99% Invisible is a tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world. New episodes every Tuesday on 99pi.org. This is just the tumblr.
On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.”
And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year.
(Credit: New York Times, Nov 23, 1924)
Much of the public viewed the car as a death machine. One newspaper cartoon even compared the car to Moloch, the god to whom the Ammonites supposedly sacrificed their children.
Pedestrian deaths were considered public tragedies. Cities held parades and built monuments in memory of children who had been struck and killed by cars. Mothers of children killed in the streets were given a special white star to honor their loss.
(Courtesy of Peter Norton)
The main cause for these deaths was that the rules of the street were vastly different than how they are today. A street functioned like a city park, or a pedestrian mall, where you could move in any direction without really thinking about it. The only moving hazards were animals and other people.
Turn-of-the-century footage from San Francisco’s Market Street shows just how casually people strode into the street.
If a car hit someone, the car was to blame. From the New York Times, November 23, 1924:
The horrors of peace appear to be appalling than the horrors of war. The automobile looms up as a far more destructive piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death the artilleryman. The man in streets seems less safe than the man in the trench. The greatest single lethal factor is the automobile. It left shambles in its wake as it coursed through 1923.
(From left: poster by Harry de Bauffer, reproduced in “Poster Wins Second Prize,” Milwaukee Journal, September 28, 1920; poster by George Starkey, reproduced in “Winning Safety Poster,” Milwaukee Journal, September 25, 1920.)
Automotive interests banded together under the name Motordom. One of Motordom’s public relations gurus was a man named E. B. Lefferts, who put forth a radical idea: don’t blame cars, blame human recklessness. Lefferts and Motordom sought to exonerate the machine by placing the blame with individuals.
And it wasn’t just drivers who could be reckless–pedestrians could be reckless, too. Children could be reckless.
This subtle shift allowed for streets to be re-imagined as a place where cars belonged, and where people didn’t. Part of this re-imagining had to do with changing the way people thought of their relationship to the street. Motordom didn’t want people just strolling in.
So they coined a new term: “Jay Walking."
In the early 20th Century, "jay” was a derogatory term for someone from the countryside. Therefore, a “jaywalker” is someone who walks around the city like a jay, gawking at all the big buildings, and who is oblivious to traffic around him. The term was originally used to disparage those who got in the way of other pedestrians, but Motordom rebranded it as a legal term to mean someone who crossed the street at the wrong place or time.
Over time, Americans began to view their relationship to the automobile as a sort of love affair–which means that logic need not always apply. Groucho Marx even said so himself!
(Credit: Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Poster illustrated by Isadore Posoff, 1937)
Our reporter this week is Jesse Dukes, who spoke with historian Peter Norton about the invention of jaywalking.
We just learned today (literally!) that Peter Norton previously appeared on BackStory With the American History Guys in 2008, speaking with host Brian Balogh (who also happens to have been Peter Norton’s dissertation adviser). Check out that interview here.
We had help recreating historical (and counterfactual) America with the vocal talent of Snap Judgment’s Pat Mesiti-Miller, Stephanie Foo, Anna Sussman, Will Urbina, and Nick van der Kolk. Their recent episode Making It Work is an instant classic!
Support for this episode comes in part from Tiny Letter–email for people with something to say!
Support also comes from Squarespace, offering listeners a free trial and 10% new orders–head to squarespace.com/99invisible and use the code “invisible4”.
“Cooper’s Law now exists, and it gives the city the power to suspend or revoke the license of a cabdriver who kills or maims a pedestrian with the right of way on a New York street.”
This is much more radical than you would think. It’s big step towards creating safer urban environments for pedestrians.
This past year, fourteen cyclists died on the streets of London.
With the dangerous city roads in mind, British architect Norman Foster has unveiled Skycycle: a network of car-free bicycle paths elevated above London’s railways.
If this concept is approved, it could actually appear in 20 years.
Failed utopian cities. Including the floating city, the completely indoor city, vegetarian city, the garden city, the locally-made city, and, of course, drunk city. Yep.
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Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever.
(“Walled City Night Views (from SW Corner), 1987.” Greg Girard.)
By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000). That’s a population density of at least 3.2 million per square mile. For New York City to get that dense, every man, woman, and child living in Texas would have to move to Manhattan.
To put it another way, think about living in a 1,200 square foot home. Then imagine yourself living with 9 other people. Then imagine that your building is only one unit of a twelve-story building, and every other unit is as full as yours. Then imagine hundreds those buildings crammed together in a space the size of four football fields.
We can’t really imagine it, either.
(Credit: Ian Lambot)
Kowloon Walled City began as a military fort in Kowloon, a region in mainland China. In 1898, China signed a land lease with Great Britain, giving the British control of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and other nearby territories. But the lease stipulated that the fort in Kowloon would remain under Chinese jurisdiction.
Over time, the fort became abandoned, leaving the area subject to neither Chinese nor British authority. This legal gray zone was attractive to displaced and marginalized people. Thousands of people moved there after the war with Japan broke out in 1937. Even more people moved there after the Communist Revolution. It attracted gangsters, drug addicts, sex workers, and refugees. And it also drew a lot of normal people from all over China who saw opportunity there.
They built the city building by building, first blanketing the area of the fort, then building vertically.
(Left: “West Side Street (Overhead Pipes), 1990." Right: "Water Standpipe (Man Washing), 1989." Greg Girard.)
Buildings were packed together so tightly in the Walled City that the alleys were nearly pitch-black in the day time. Electricity and water were brought in by illegal or informal means.
There was no garbage collection, so people pitched their trash out of their windows.
The Walled City gained a reputation as a sort of den of iniquity–there were high levels of prostitution, gambling, mafia activity, and rampant unlicensed dentistry.
("Walled City Dentist Window, 1989.” Greg Girard.)
But an order did emerge. There was an informal kindergarten. A resident’s organization settled disputes. And there was lots of industry.
(Left: “Workers in a Fishball Factory, 1987." Right: "Worker in Metalwork Shop, 1988." Greg Girard.)
Kowloon Walled City was torn down in 1993. Today, it’s Kowloon Walled City Park. Most traces of the city are gone, though there is a model of the city cast in bronze.
But the memory of the city lives on. It was featured in the non-verbal film Baraka, and plays a cameo role in Bloodsport.
It’s also served as the setting in a number of video games, including most recently Call of Duty: Black Ops
If you still can’t get enough of Kowloon Walled City, here’s an hour-long documentary (in German, with English subtitles)
This week’s episode was produced by Nick van der Kolk (whom you may remember from Episode #21). He spoke with photographer Greg Girard and architect Aaron Tan, who both spent time in the Walled City. Nick also talked to as Brian Douglas, who helped design Call of Duty: Black Ops.
In European city, you can usually tell where the oldest part of town is. It’s most likely at the center, pinpointed by some grand church, with layers of progressively newer buildings spiraling out from it.
This pattern holds true in the Netherlands, according to an interactive map of all 9,866,539 buildings in the entire country. A developer at Amsterdam’s Waag Society, an institute for art, science and technology, built this infographic on top of the CitySDK data distribution platform.
Newer buildings are blue, old buildings are red, and other buildings are gradients in between.
It’s a little harder to approximate the age of building in North America if it doesn’t have a plaque in front.
However! If you live in Brooklyn or Portland, you’re in luck - not just because you live in a great place, but also because you’ve got interactive maps of your cities, arranged by date of construction.
The color schemes and designs of these maps are interesting as well, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
Okay Brooklyn, Portland, and the Netherlands, go out and find the old gems/ unmask the new knockoffs around your neighborhood!
If your town doesn’t have an interactive age map, here’s how to go make one.
1. Drop the last number of the address you want to find. (So, if you want to find 260 Park Avenue South, drop the number 0).
2. Divide that remainder by 2. (26 becomes 13).
3. Now add or subtract to that that number according to the “key number” in the chart above, provided by DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: New York City. The answer will be the nearest numbered cross street (Add 8 — the key number for Park Avenue South — to 13 to get 21. The nearest cross street for 260 Park Avenue South is 21st street).
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MANHATTAN’S TREES TEND to get overshadowed—quite literally in some cases—by skyscrapers that line the city’s streets. But they play an essential role in the city’s habitat: providing oxygen, supporting wildlife, and managing the flow and movement of rainwater.
Starting in May, the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation will begin a five to seven month-long street census to locate and identify the species of every street-side tree.”
