99% Invisible - 103- UTBAPH

Episode Date: February 26, 2014

It started with some Pittsburgh humor. Pittsburgh-based comedian Tom Muisal does a bit about a GPS unit that can give directions in “Pittsburghese.” Because in Pittsburgh, no one calls it “Interstate 376,” it’s “The Parkway.” It’s not “The Liberty Tunnel,” … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I am Roman Mars. Let's start with some Pittsburgh humor. This is comedian Tom Usual on WDVE in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's my dad's birthday a few weeks ago and I thought you know what, I'm going to get something really nice for my dad, something he's really going to like. So I got him this GPS system, you know, are those nice ones with the sexy voice that talks to you while you're driving. Right. I'm like, he's going to love this. Tom's dad, a lifelong Pittsburgher, couldn't make heads nor tails of the GPS's directions because I am told no one in Pittsburgh actually calls anything by its official name. It's not Interstate 376, it's the parkway, it's not the Liberty tunnel, it's the tubes.

So the joke goes, looking to help his dad out, Tom downloaded a special plug-in that makes the GPS device give directions like a Pittsburgher. Get on a parkway going towards Tom. Get off like you're going to Canny Woods, where you're going up a hill under a railroad track and you're making a left and a right the same time. Go pass that crazy church up there on stilts. Make a right and if you go pass where Swissville high school used to be you went too far. Where used to be? Yeah, you have to know where stuff used to be.

Otherwise you're in trouble. Sometimes the stories of what used to be can have more meaning than what's actually here now. The philosopher Guy de Bohr had a word for using your emotions and memories as a way of way finding. He called it psychogiography. That's the philosopher Sam Greenspan. And psychogiography is particularly useful in Pittsburgh. So we passed Bob's diner. Bob's diner that we just passed used to be a car dealership. And I

know that because it was a car dealership when I first moved to this area. And then the family dollar across the street there used to be a grocery store. And I don't know that one first hand. That's just all through here, say. This is Pittsburgh resident Mike Neilsson. This place is just right with things that used to be things. It's like it's kind of like history, you know. It's not history like George Washington and the whiskey rebellion, but this stuff is, it's our history. Mike is not from Pittsburgh. He grew up on the other side of the state.

So when he moved there, he had a hard time figuring out how to get around. Because Pittsburghers are always telling him to turn left at something that isn't there anymore. And so one day Mike was hanging out with his buddy Tom. That is Tom Usual, the comedian from a minute ago. Tom was trying out the Pittsburgher GPS routine on Mike. As he kind of told it different ways, it was normally where there used to be that gas station or where there used to be that Italian restaurant. And you'd say, yeah, that's kind of funny.

But I think in one telling of the joke or somewhere along the line He said something about you know, oh, yeah, where there used to be that pizza hut The light went off in my head I said ah, yes the pizza hut for Mike the former pizza hut was a beacon of light Shining through a thick fog of impossible directions Because here in his friend's comedy routine, was the one Pittsburgh-East direction he could give that anyone, regardless of where they're from, could comprehend.

Ten left at the place that used to be a pizza hut. There are two hallmarks of pizza hut architecture. One, the whole thing is built at a trap zoids. The windows are trap zoids, and they're framed by this kind of trapezoidal paneling on the exterior. If you remember your geometry, you know that trapezoid is a four-sided figure with two parallel sides and two non-parallel sides. It tends to look like a triangle with a top chopped off. If you see the trapezoid windows, then you know it's an old pizza hut. And then there's the roof, which often has oversized trapezoidal awnings, and where they all connect to the top is this big hump that just shoots into the air.

The whole thing looks like a lid for the building, or a hat. Actually, when I was a kid, I thought, a hut and hat meant the same thing. Thank you, Pizza Hut. Now Pizza Hut's don't all look like this. Franchise owners have a lot of freedom in how their stores look. Now, the Reap Pizza Hut has the lid roof and the trapezoid features, and some might be more distinctive than others, but there's still enough commonality in pizza huts

that once you've seen one, you can easily identify any other. In fact, the PizzaHot School of Architecture is so distinctive that even when a pizza hut goes under and gets converted into a different business, you can still totally tell it used to be a pizza hut goes under and gets converted into a different business, you can still totally tell. It used to be a pizza hut. And every town across the world, there used to be a pizza hut.

And most of them are still standing, and most of them are not still pizza huts. And so it's this image that we just all have, and we're all so familiar with. Okay, Mike is definitely overstating it here, not every town in the world has a former pizza hut. And I couldn't get numbers on whether or not the majority of the old school trapezoidal window style pizza huts are still active pizza huts, but the fact remains, there is something really funny and a little sad, but mostly funny about seeing a former pizza hut get turned into something else.

The satirical newspaper The Onion Thoughts O2, they once had a headline that read, you can tell Area Bank used to be a pizza hut. If The Onion thinks it's funny too, I'm validated. And so Mike Nielsen did the only logical thing to do when you get obsessed with something. He started a blog. And his blog is called It Used to Be a Pizza Hut,

which is a blog about the current uses of former pizza huts. It is a global atlas of buildings that used to be pizza huts. I can't defend it, so I'll just go ahead and say, yep, that's what I've been doing with some of my spare time. He even coined a word for them. I guess they're upbaths. You know, what you get when you abbreviate used to be a pizza hut, UTBAPH.

Though, I don't think Mike had ever said it out loud. Upbath, does that sound right? A bath. I mean that sounds horrendous, but I guess that's just what it spells out to be. I should have done a better background in it. I should have thought of something that would spell out something really cool. Mike started documenting a baths around Pennsylvania, like that pocket pond in North for sales, with its trapezoidal windows done up in a kind of sea foam green

with yellow trim. Pretty soon, he started getting submissions from across the US, and from Australia and New Zealand. Through this data set, Mike was able to chart some trends. Sometimes there's still pizza restaurants, which I think makes sense too. They probably had pizza ovens in them that maybe stuck around. There's sopranos, pizzeria, and york, Pennsylvania, and la portchetta, and auclin, New Zealand. There are evenanos pizzeria in York, Pennsylvania, and La Portetta in Auckland, New Zealand. There are even cases of Domino's pizza moving into Uttbafs. The gall. And then there's a class of non-pizzer restaurants.

Mexican and Asian restaurants, generally Chinese restaurants. Chinese Hut in Toronto, Ontario. Suvlaki Hut in Dandenong Australia. The structures that housed these businesses all began life unmistakably as pizza huts. But there are some more interesting ones. I think one of the most popular posts on the blog is the Des Moines Police Traffic Unit. On that entry, Mike writes, and I quote, all the cops week after week that if they don't get their act together and get traffic violations under

control, they will have to work at a pizza hut. And then the mayor coming in and breaking the news that they would, indeed, all be working in a pizza hut. Evidence room in the cooler interrogations happening in the booths, secretaries playing table top Pac-Man instead of solitary. That is how I picture this one. And I love it. There's a funeral home in Australia that is in a form of pizza hut. Olson's Funeral's in Reavesby, New South Wales. In the crown jewel of all of Baths, Brisbane Australia's chaos adult concepts, chaos and concepts are in stock with Kays. It was an adult bookstore and it had all the windows kind of boarded up,

you know, as adult bookstores tend to. Though I'm guessing most adult bookstores don't have to have their window coverings cut into trapezoids. Now I should say that Mike doesn't have any particular affinity for pizza hut. Sure, he went there as a kid, ate some personal pan pizzas, played some tabletop Pac-Man, drank Pepsi out of translucent red plastic cups. But it's not like he's nostalgic.

He just thought Uttbas were funny. I'm a pretty easily amused kind of guy, and so I thought it was funny, but I think a lot of things are funny. But I think it's more than funny. Mike's project points to the fact that there just aren't too many companies whose very name describes their own signature brand of mass-produced architecture that they themselves inhabit. Although Pizza Hut never meant for architecture to be the focus of their brand, at least not at first.

Pizza was founded in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas. It was actually founded by two brothers who were students at Wichita State University. And with that, you know, 56 years later, it's grown into the world's largest pizza company with more than 14,000 restaurants around the world. Doug Turfor is the public relations director of Pizza Hut. He says that when Pizza Hut's founders, the brothers Frank and Dan Carney

bought their first building, they got a sign that only had room for eight letters. It had room for pizza on top, but it only had room for three characters or three letters underneath that. And any Scrabble Player knows that there are really only so many three letter words. Pizza Dad, Pizza Sad, Pizza Eel. And they kind of looked at the shape of their building and thought, well, it just kind of looks like a hut.

So maybe we called pizza hut. So if they had four letters, maybe it would have been called pizza shed. Yeah, pizza zone, pizza, something like that. Now, the original pizza hut is still around, though not in operation. It's an up path. It's been moved to the campus of the founders on the modern Wichita State. Just outside their school of entrepreneurialism. The first pizza hut is commemorated with a plaque. And if not for that plaque, you'd have no idea what it is. It just looks like a tiny brick house. N area trapezoid anywhere.

Pizza Hut signature look came later. That was the work of an architect, a friend and classmate of the Carney brothers. A guy by the name of Richard Burke. Burke wanted $32,000 to do the design. The Carney's counter offered with $100 per Pizza Hut to subsequently open. Burke accepted and created a lot of the features that we can now recognize today irrefutably as pizza huts. And from there pizza

huts architecture and their corporate image became intertwined. And so the Carnies and their franchisees began lining the American landscape with hut after hut after hut. But in their ascendancy, pizza hut couldn't or simply wouldn't imagine a time when the people would not come out in droves to enjoy a personal pan pizza or a zesty breadstick. As market trends shifted away from the dining experience and onto delivery, many pizza huts closed. And as their trapezoidal windows went dark and their roof humps rose up over empty parking lots, it was as if the company had littered the world with monuments to its own decline.

It reminds you that there used to be pizza huts everywhere and that there aren't anymore. We see the old pizza huts laying around, the sort of the dead carcasses along the road. And now, Pizza Hut's architectural legacy is one that will remind pastors by of the company's failure to thrive in every single place it ever failed to thrive. But Doug Turfor of Pizza Hut,

he thinks that Udbaths are a triumph. We're pretty proud of the fact that our business became so recognizable that you can just look at a building and recognize that even as it got turned into something and then maybe even turned over into something else again, that when you just look at it, people know that used to be a Pizza Hut. That's really cool to us. I have to say, I think I'm with Doug on this one. Yes, the hubris of Pizza Hut is the stuff of Greek tragedy. But this is not a story about failure.

It's a story about hope, about what can be reclaimed, about the possibilities for what might emerge out of what couldn't have ever been dreamed up from the outset A mollusk dies and a hermit crab moves into its shell But pizza hut is actually curbing the rise of duck baths in the late 1990s and early odds The company shifted towards a carry out and delivery model today about half the pizza huts in the US operate out of generic Glass box looking structures. No trapezoids, no sloped roofs, they don't stand out. In fact, a newer-style pizza hut near my apartment just went out of business. And if I hadn't ever seen it in operation, there'd be no way to know what it once was. Now that I've seen the next generation of faceless used to be a pizza hut, I think that

if pizza hut phases out their signature buildings, it will be a huge mistake. Because pizza hut has achieved a level of greatness here. I mean, how many other structures have there ever been in history, whose true essence can shine through whatever might come after it? If you open to hamburger joint in the great pyramid of Giza, it will always, first and foremost, be the great pyramid of Giza. And left at the place that used to be the great pyramid of Giza.

Like the pyramid, the Pizza Hut, the humble Pizza Hut, succeeds in etching its identity onto everything else that will ever come after it. It is at that level. The Pizza Hut manages to constantly remind everyone, hey, I was here. I am the place with the personal pan pizzas, with the translucent red plastic cups, with a tabletop Pac-Man. So let us stand in awe of the mighty Pizza Hut, which more than just about any other once beloved establishment since crumbled beneath the sands of time can reach into the future and proclaim. Just try and forget about me. Just try. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, What? I'm at the Taco Bell. I'm at the combination pizza hut and Taco Bell.

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I'm talking about combination piece of honey, I'm talking about combination piece of honey, I'm talking about combination piece of honey, I River. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arksign, a brilliant architecture firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, Sam tweets at Sam listens, Avery tweets at Troublemen. We also have a Tumblr that's really fantastic. But if you want lots more about upbaths, photos of the original Pizza Hut complete with a plaque and a completely different comedy sketch about Pittsburgh directions that also references a Pizza Hut. Go to 99pi.org.

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