99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-43- Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators

Episode Date: December 19, 2011

“There’s a secret jazz seeping from Washington’s aging Metro escalators – those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and squawk…why are you still wearing those earbuds?” -Chris Richards, “Move along with the soundtrack of Metro’s … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21centri.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This is the first joke I ever really noticed as a design joke. I like an escalator, Matt, because an escalator

can never break. It can only become stairs. That's Mitch Hedberg. All right. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign. Only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience. Being designed to elegantly deal with the extreme failure

case is probably an under-appreciated design element, but it really is one of the things that makes an escalator great. Worst case, they're stairs. See how far you get in a broken elevator. I bet everyone wants escalators. I'm enjoying that design aspect too. And we're getting our cardio. That's 99% in visible zone, Sam Greenspan walking up

an escalator in a metro station in DC. Ever since the industrial revolution when it became possible for products to be designed just once and then mass produced, it has been the slight failures and imperfections and the individual wear and tear introduced by human use that transforms a quality, mass produced product into a thing we actually love. Your worn-in blue jeans, your grandmother's iron skillet, the initial design determined

its quality, but it's there post-manufacturing imperfections that make them comfortable, that make them lovable, that make them yours. If you think a slightly broken escalator can't be lovable, well maybe you haven't been paying attention. An escalator on a DC Metro platform is like a fine wine. It's better with age and without any industrial lubricant. Sam lives in Baltimore now, but he lived in DC for a few years. He said that this sound came to embody the excitement he felt from living in a city. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in one of Florida's most depressing suburbs. I mean, it's just miles and miles of highways and coals to sack.

Very nice. Thank you. So when I moved to DC, I took public transit everywhere just because I could. The DC Metro system, it's not the best in the world, but it's pretty good. Although a lot of people do lament the poor condition of the Metro's escalators. Some are just flat out broken, and then there are some that work but make these crazy noises. Which, you know, annoy a lot of people, but for me, I found that a skrunking escalator was like this little trumpeter announcing how awesome it was to live in the city

It turns out that someone else loves this sound too. So this is Chris Richards I'm the pop music critic at the Washington Post Chris was also in a band called Q and not U He wrote a kind of appreciation of the Metro escalators for the post We're at the Farragut North Metro station in Washington, D.C. on the north side of El Street in Connecticut Avenue. Chris told me that he had never really noticed the sound that the escalators made until one day when he was on a bit of a free jazz kick. Having my ear train for those sort of breath on brass kind of sounds, I think maybe turning

the corner to come down the escalators one day. I thought, oh, there's a saxophone player playing at the bottom of the metro, but it wasn't that at all. This is the escalator is kind of like walking and screeching away. Maybe they were, I don't know if they were always this loud. On the escalator, there's a plastic element on the side of each step that keeps it from rubbing against the metal siding. A lubricant keeps it all running smoothly, but when a ranger snows, the lubrication wears off. So what you're hearing when you hear these kind of like moaning squawks is the steel stairs sort of rubbing up and chafing against that plastic element when it's gotten a little too dry.

Kind of like a beautiful serendipitous aftershock of the wear and tear that these escalators are facing. It sounds like music. And like any good music critic, Chris started classifying the different styles of metro escalator. So here at Fair music critic, Chris started classifying the different styles of Metro escalator. So here at Fair Good North, the escalators might sound like... Whales mating. Or something like that. Whereas the escalator at Eustreet kind of sounded like Indian drone music.

And Columbia Heights. An aviary of chrome-throated ravens taunting you as you descend into your workday. We understand that we could be over romanticizing escrowing and squeaking escalator. You can talk all day about appreciating the ambiance soundscape around you and get really into a stethisized ways of listening Chris Richards was big on this by the way, but you could also just as easily say, you know, hey, this is all noise.

I think it's all really an air of the beholder. Yeah, it is totally understandable that people wouldn't appreciate a screeching escalator. Chris actually told me that when he called up Metro for his story, their PR people didn't believe him. They thought he was writing some big expose about escalator failure. Quite the opposite really. I was trying to say, you know, even though these things are a little bit beat down, this is a wonderful little residual bonus. I guess. My point of view is if you're going to be subjected to some kind of sensory experience of which you have no control every single day, then it's to your benefit. It's, you know, why not try to enjoy something because there's enough things in life to be

stressed out about. As much as people complain about what all the sounds that cities make and all the noises that cities make, I think those noises define it and really become our environment. The sound can be an irritation or it can be information. Chris got me hoping the escalators never get fixed, except the ones that just straight up don't work. The escalator at the Wheaton stop, it is the longest escalator in the western hemisphere. It takes 3 minutes to ride to the top when it's working.

Let's hope that the Wheaton escalator doesn't conveniently become stairs anytime soon. 99% Invisible was produced this week by our intern Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. It was adapted from an episode of Sam's podcast Whisper Cities, a show about overlooked places and the people who find them. Find out more at WhisperCities.org. This program is made possible with support from the lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW-91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design.

99% Invisible is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange, making public radio more public. Find out more at prx.org. To find out more or keep in touch with us especially if you want to tell us about your favorite sound which you know, which you know for a fact is somebody else's noise, go to our website you you