Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 107: 2013 Salvation Army Building Collapse

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

this is an episode about porno theaters and hoagies june's twitter: https://twitter.com/RITTSQU june's web zone: https://june.zone/ june's art studio: https://space1026.com/ 844 North Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19130 details on The Building Show coming soon Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

Weren't you listening, God damn it? No. Why don't you ever listen? I don't because I'm a man. Justin never listens to me. Bro, silencing women. Mm hmm. The Justin Rosniak story. Really?

Oh, all right. I think we have a podcast going now. Yeah, I think so. Oh, so how will the shake in the street? We'll see. We'll see. That's the subject of today's podcast, which is hello. Shit in the street.

Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. OK, go. I am Alice Kordelkeli. I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. I'm the person who's talking right now. And my pronouns are yay and Liam. Wow. Actually, they're he and him. That's confusing.

You got those new pronouns. Yeah, congratulations, Liam. Hi, everybody. My name is June Armstrong. My pronouns are she and her. And I guess I'm a third time. Well, there's your problem. Yes, rarefied air.

Yes, that's returning champion. Yeah, returning three time champion for Philadelphia. Fun fact that gets you that gets you exclusive access to our well, there's your problem lounge, which is better than the trash future lounge. Yeah, we've got like flavored waters. Is that when I climb through your backyard? Like that's what it is.

Yeah, just as backyard is the is the well, that's your problem. It's true. I can't confirm. I think twice now, June has had to let me into my apartment after an unfortunate locked door incident. Both times were also my fault. So this is also true. Yes. Yeah. Every time you go out together, she just takes your keys

and throws them into a storm drain. Yes, she's tricky like that. You know, it's just it's just hot girl shit. What you see in in front of you on the screen here are the remnants of a building. And one of these buildings was supposed to be demolished. Well, it works. And so does everybody else.

Well, the other one was not supposed to be demolished. You're telling me the fire department didn't just shout to watch because they sort of be cool. Oh, because they didn't pay the whatever fire protection money like that family intended. Crassus's fire department has showed up to tear this building down for nonpayment. Yes. No, today we're going to talk about the the 2013

Hogy City building collapse and Salvation Army collapse in Philadelphia. And this is, you know, it looks like a small little thing, but it was a big thing here in Philadelphia, where we all live. Yeah, well, yeah, that's right. Well, I think the thing about Philadelphia is that it is a small a small town of no more than five or six thousand people. Yes. So Philadelphia goes so does the rest of the world. Yeah. And news travels, it's like an Ohio paper of record,

the Philadelphia Inquirer. Oh, God. A lot better than those provincial papers, like the I'ms in the post. But first we have to do the goddamn news. Nature is terrifying. Dude, yeah, yeah, sure. It's returning an elephant in India. An elephant killed a woman and then returned

to trample on her corpse at a funeral. To which we say solidarity with the body. Yeah. After lifting her body from the funeral pyre as the family performed last rights, the elephant was reported to have traveled 200 kilometers to do this. Imagine how much you'd have to hate someone to walk 200 kilometers just to fuck up their funeral. What did this woman do to this elephant?

Something unethical. I support critical support for the elephant in this time. Yeah, I support in pretty much all man versus animal situations. I support animal. Yeah, I root for nature. Yeah, I got sorry about this one. Nature is a smart bit anyway. I mean, what happened here? I mean, how does the elephant know when the funeral would be? How do you know what a funeral was?

Elephant tip line. What sort of network of informants did this elephant have? Elephants are really smart. Elephants are one of those animals we, you know, there's a lot of animals that are pretty smart and elephants are one of them. I think an elephant is probably smarter than me on a bad day. I'll take that. I'll take that bet. And more willing to fuck up someone's funeral.

Wait, but yeah, to that point, Liam, I think Justin is less likely to remember the funeral and get over to the funeral. The elephants definitely going to be there and definitely going to trample. Good for the elephant, man. Oh, yeah, I mean, I think this is justice. This seems like justice. How did how did the elephant kill this woman in the first place by trampling her?

Yes. But and then again, raised her up and did a forklift thing with the corpse. This sort of driving this woman's corpse. Yeah. Oh, my God. Is that the elephant's music? Yeah, they only got a folding chair. Just wax you with the trunk.

I don't know. I don't know what this woman did to deserve it. But all I can say is that she probably did deserve it. Yeah. Elephant exercise and castle doctrine, you know. Yeah, I think this would be stand your ground law. To trample your ground, really. Yeah, I mean, what can you say, except critical support for elephant? We support elephant in all manners.

Yeah, yeah, we got to organize these elephants. You know, I think if if we can make them into into next lights, if we can make them into Marxists, then, you know, future is right, right? Problem solved. You can cry. They already understand theory because they're smarter than us. So, yeah, it's true.

That is true. I imagine I'm not as smart as the average element. Like, that's the same reason I don't need octopus. Right. Yeah, they got they got bigger brains than us. The elephants, I mean, not the octopus. Yeah, so we just got to start dropping like copies of the Communist Manifesto onto elephant herds from drones. And then pretty soon, you know, that's that's what a vanguard party is. Well, that's the issue is that we don't we don't have a we don't speak elephant.

You because it's too advanced of a language for us to understand. And so do you think we can train the manifesto into elephant, maybe difficult? Do you think we could get like one of those sentient neural networks that they're working on to talk to the elephants? Oh, we should have a goddamn news. Yeah, I guess it's more of a trash future bit. But we'll get that. You say sentient neural networks.

Do you mean just a guy? Yeah, it's a brain in the chart programs, the computer to just say whatever you wanted to say. The elephant can type into programs, the computer to trick Google engineers into believing the sentience. The mechanical Turk has gone too far. The mechanical Turk was an organic Turk. You know, the mechanical Turk needs a buddy comedy movie.

That's always something it really does. Yeah. Yeah. Give me the safety brothers mechanical Turk movie. That's my opinion. Another another hero from the past who ended up celebrating his last days in Philadelphia. Oh, I thought you were going to say he was a pervert. I mean, he's a best chess guy. Are we going to cancel the mechanical Turk?

I guess. Yes. Yes. Sure. One hour. Yeah. Well, all we can say is critical support for elephant. That's right. In seeking vengeance. That's right. Successfully. In other news. It's happening. The RMT Rail Maritime and Transport Union

has balloted for three days of strike action, which will absolutely fuck up most train service, most passenger train service in the UK. 21st of June, 23rd of June, 25th of June, running a very reduced schedule and a lot of the network. It's just trains aren't running at all. If you're curious as to why this is happening, it's because Network Rail, which administers like trackside and like signaling and stuff, they want to cut like two and a half thousand jobs

because their budget is being cut. Yeah, they want to they want to cut like two billion pounds worth of expenditure. And so they want to like pass those savings on to you, the consumer, by eliminating a shitload of cleaning stuff, maintenance stuff, signaling stuff, guards and so on and so on and so on. It's obviously like on its face, a huge safety issue. But also if you've been fucking cleaning stations through the pandemic and not to mention that like at least one

like London Transport worker that we know of was basically murdered by a guy who like spat in her face. If you're a reward, yeah, if your reward for that is to be is to be laid off, then, you know, of course, your union should strike and and more power to them for doing it. If you're being subjected to like hay freezes and the cost of living crisis. If you're being forced to work extra hours, then of course, your union should strike. I'm glad the RMT is militant enough to strike.

Yes. And of course, their reward is that they're getting monster in the British press, who are, you know, tiring them all as communists, which is true, but based. Yes, that's the Putinists, which is like this, like three of them. Oh, that logic. That means the same thing that these people. No, I mean, it's it's because like a couple of the more senior guys like went to Donbass in 2018 to talk about like anti fascism in the context of Ukraine. It's bad. Oh, I know these people have ever cared.

I know, I know. It's so it's so cynical. That's that's part of it. And then, like, of course, the other thing is, but train drivers get paid, you know, fifty five grand a year and only have to work, you know, an hour a week or whatever the fuck it is. Is it really just fifty five grand? Like, that's not a key.

I mean, I know that's pounds, but I'm still like, I could pay it a lot more here. I think it genuinely is. I think that's like it's one of the last good union jobs going and it pays not that much, but a lot of people, a lot of journalists are able to sell this as like a prince's a prince's wage. And it's like, OK, fine. Well, they're earning what market forces demand, right? And that's what you wanted.

But like a basic apartment in Britain costs like the same as a palace here. Infinity trillion pounds. Yeah, when we're not talking about a you can own your own home sort of situation here. But also what's so surprising about train drivers who are very well compensated relatively, like having solidarity with and withholding their labor on behalf of the people who clean the fucking platforms who are not and are in the same union. So, yeah, it's it's it's based and if the government doesn't negotiate, if Network Rail doesn't negotiate and come up with a better deal,

then that's what's happening. And I hope they win. Yeah, industrial unionism. It's good. Yeah. Yeah, welcome to the welcome to the free market. This is what you wanted. You dumb assholes. Yeah, now I look forward to you being absorbed as the 51st state

and industrial union labor paradise. Yeah, absolutely. Big Pennsylvania. I think it's probably be good if we absorb the United Kingdom. You know, it would be it would be more honest, I suppose. Yeah, it would make a lot. A lot of sense. I got a special relationship for you right here. We could maybe maybe we could rename it air strip one. Build a bunch of like our colleges.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, that would be a good idea. I was I was thinking yesterday, you know, be a be good idea to build a launch our colleges somewhere. So Britain seems to be the place. Yeah, let's make it happen. Yeah, we're finally getting back at the back into housing twister again, to which I can only I can only answer build stuff underground,

dig a big hole, put it in the ground. But you understand that engineers for council solutions to problems, don't you, Alice? That kid was like 19 and he had like 12 followers like welcome. That's where the pipes is. All right, that was Ross. It's hard out here in these streets. You got to show no mercy, bud.

That's right. That's right. That was the god damn news. OK, so in order to talk about this disaster, I think we need to talk about something we need to slowly and carefully talk about our stinkingly explain the surprisingly obvious. OK, how does a brick building work? Well, it's like it's like an it's like a jingo puzzle. It's like a hole in the ground, but upside down in opposition to that.

Yeah, it's like building houses. You put a bunch of bricks on top of each other and then people live in there and they start like web design businesses or whatever the phone they make scented candles, all of the shit that people do inside the buildings. Yes. So you're you're sort of your load bearing masonry structure, right, is you stack bricks on top of each other. You put mortar between the bricks, right? And then you add big wooden joists between the brick walls

and then you build a floor on that, right? Relatively simple, right, in concept. Obviously, there's stuff like staircases that interrupt the joists. There's there's there's complications in here. Assume a perfectly spherical brick building. Yes, brick buildings are always spherical. Now, I think it's important to mention that the front the front of the building, what's considered the facade and then the rear

elevation are nonstructural elements. They are their curtain walls. So those are not connected to the joists. They're only connected to the to the two major vertical party walls that really hold the building up. So the junction of the joists. Interesting. Yeah, because your your joists run

parallel to the front of the building. There's nothing running perpendicular. You generally on these old fashioned masonry building, at least something that's not extremely high, you have three wives of brick, right? So a wife is like one row of brick. So you'd have one wife, two wives, three wives. And then the courses are like how they're stacked vertically, right?

It's like this three bricks deep. Unless you're going up really high. Or if you're not lucky and it's less than that, or it might be less than that. Yeah, the joists but into those the brick walls, they hold up the floors. You know, and then and then on your your side walls, if they're if they're partitioned walls, you don't have anything interesting there. If if they face the street, you might have, you know, some features like maybe you have a flat arch,

maybe you have some curved arch openings, maybe you have some lintels, maybe you have some, you know, you need windows for, you know, you got to recapture your original sort of 22 living underground on the desktop. That's right. Yeah. That's what it's more efficient. Yeah, I know, but I can't play warzone on Linux. I'm begging you, Activision.

You have different qualities of bricks. So like the outermost wide is going to be something called face brick. And that has like, you know, so it's better. It's better finished, right? Sometimes maybe it's glazed or something. Maybe it's a different color. Behind that, you have common brick, which is shit. Again, I'm sorry.

Your common brick is a lot cheaper because it's not designed to be seen. It's designed just to hold stuff up. It doesn't have to hold up to the weather, right? It is. It's it's not a it's not a luxury material, right? Which is why, you know, you see all these, you know, a trend recently has been like you have exposed brick in your house. And it's like, no, I don't want to see that. That's because it looks terrible.

Yeah. So there's all these other things that are probably left better left for another another day when we're talking about putting buildings up instead of taking buildings down. But the whole the whole way these traditional brick buildings work is in a is in a system, right? Exposed brick is exposed because it's supposed to have a layer of or it's supposed to have three layers of plaster over it that act as a water, you know, a water permeable layer that's breathable,

that lets things go in and out of the building so you don't get these giant, you know, areas where a bunch of water can collect, a bunch of mold can collect. The idea is that the whole thing kind of works. And when you take out part of that system and you have something like an exposed brick wall, which I agree with Justin is fucking disgusting. That shit stays on the outside of your building and don't you fucking try to paint it either?

Because Justin and I are going to come to your house. Don't we'll come to your house and we'll stop you from painting it. Well, I'm painting. Because also that causes big problems with break because if you paint the exterior brick, it traps the water and glad gradually turns it into sort of a mush. Right. But the important thing is to know that that all these things really do work in in concert with each other to keep the building up.

And of course, you're dealing with all of the forces that we deal with every day of gravity, where everything's pulling down. Yeah, essentially, the thing that over time destroys a building if you are not trying to pull it down is is just the force of weight, the force of time and vibrations and gravity and entropy, which, of course, all of us. Well, yeah, so you have the life, the life cycle of a brick building is determined by, you know, how you treat it.

And, you know, people don't like to treat them very well. You know, maybe that's just for squares, Roz. Yeah, the exposed brick, it looks so cool. It gives me a feeling of like authenticity and industrial design that really, I think, helps me with my web design business. But yeah, so you're like your your your life cycle of a brick building is, you know, they last for 100, 200, 300, 400 years until one owner decides to paint them and then they fall down in 50.

Yeah, no, I had to meet with a stone mason who does. Restorations of large 19th century, early 20th century buildings. He told Justin, he told me today there's not going to be that that row houses were not going to have row houses in 80 years, the brick ones, because of all of the interventions that have been done over the last 50 by people who didn't know what they were doing. Cool. That sounds about right. Every time you do one of these things, it's an intervention

that that accelerates the decline of the buildings, especially if you're not sensitive to the way that the thing is actually structured. We had a joke on the I think it was vehicular cycling about how curbs are a lost technology and we can't build them anymore. But we're kind of doing that for row houses. Yeah. And well, OK, so seed row house. So it's a fucking Baltimore. I really do get a sense of how you can have like how you can be living

in what is still technically the Roman Empire and be looking at like the ruins of some baths or whatever and just be like, yeah, we don't build those anymore because we tried and a bunch of them fell down. Oh, no. And and I think I think if this story tells it to anything, it's that, you know, when you start to dig down and see who's actually running an operation or how and how something actually happens, it tends to be three toddlers in a trench coat worth of expertise. And this is just like even even the art of demolishing a building,

which you think would be pretty straightforward. The people who are actually left to do that work aren't necessarily the people who are best qualified to that work, at least in this situation. But another thing here is it's not like, you know, your load bearing masonry building is the best building imagine, right? Because they're really hard to insulate. A lot of modern like ventilation HVAC systems,

they kind of work against the thermal mass strategy that we used to have. You know, so these are not like it's not like, you know, a masonry building is the best building possible today. But it is possible to treat these buildings a lot better than we do. Yeah. And I think that also what's really important, maybe now might be a good time to go to the next slide. But, you know, in a city like Philadelphia, this is what the housing stock looks like.

This is what the buildings look like. These buildings are already here. You should learn to treat them properly. So we have to we have to take ourselves back to two thousand and thirteen Philadelphia, the shining example of a city on the hill. This is actually from this is I forget what year this is. But this was after twenty thirteen. So when one of your big one of your big things where you have attached brick

buildings, you have something called the party wall, the partition wall, right? And that's the wall. Is it not part of the building? It's part of the business wall in the front. Party wall on the sides. Exactly. Yeah. You know, there's some good stuff about having attached buildings, right? You have fewer exposed walls.

You have those walls. Don't get weather doesn't affect them, right? You go down. The downside is that like the rate of drummers that your city produces is much lower because every time a kid starts learning to play the drums, their neighbors go and murder them. I play the drums. Yeah. And you got out alive.

And it made you the fighter that you are today. That's right. That's right. Also, my neighbors were in their high nineties, which I think helped. Because these buildings are all attached, they're not they're not losing heat to adjacent buildings because they're the same. You know, they're all being heated. So you have lower energy requirements, right?

One of the bad things is you have ownership issues, right? Because your party wall is three wives of brick deep. I want to expose one of those wives for my web design businesses, aesthetics. Well, either that or if you're trying to, if you have an issue in the party wall, each property owner owns one and a half bricks. The middle brick has divided ownership. That's fun. And you have stuff like chimneys, which is even more confusing, right?

And another issue here is like, OK, if you live in a warehouse and a house next to you gets demolished, all of a sudden you start having problems, right? I see an illustration of this, the sort of gap tooth thing. Yeah, right. To think I think we may have brought this up on a previous episode. But this is I just know a lot about gap to personal experience. Well, this also goes back to the thing about how all of the all of the buildings work together as a system, right?

Right. These rows are typically built. Or I mean, these rows are put up all at the same time. They're put up from the bottom up as a huge row of houses, typically. Or they're carefully inserted as as a system. And part of that is that not face grade brick that's typically used on the interior of these walls. This is an ecology. It's just a really small sort of one.

Yeah. And so if you start to disrupt the system, everything else starts to get deteriorated. So the row house ecology with the whole thing like erects 90 degrees like a scud missile and gets launched that way. Some get Baltimore. You guys, you guys see the sum of all fears. It's going to be like that. So this is 24th and Oxford.

It's a lot of there, buddy. It's this this whole row of houses here was bought by the Philadelphia Housing Authority as part of their Sharswood project. Right. And most of these row houses were vacant, but they were all like mothballed. Right. You know, they had plywood over the windows. They got, you know, they were in OK condition. Not great, but OK.

Was this for Sharswood Tower that or is this a replacement for Sharswood? This was this is part of the replacement project. The original plan was they would renovate all these row houses. Yes, whatever that one of them. You can see I think it's this one here. It had been so far gone that it needed to be demolished. Right. And then one of them was occupied. Right. So this one had been so far gone.

It needed to be demolished and they demolished it. And they did not properly shore up the party wall of the next one. A couple of weeks went by. That one started falling in. So they had to demolish that one. A couple of weeks went by. By the end of the summer, it's like chasing down. Yeah. Yeah.

That's some good. That's some good PHA shit. That's some good PHA shit right there. And then the corner store burned down, of course, at some point. I remember when we got this whole shit, the beautiful scene of urban decay that we see before us in. I. Yeah. Yeah.

Livio Northfilly teaches you a lot about the world. That is what I have to say to that. One of the things I've always been like, kind of, you know, you look at like how we use resources in this city. We have a we have like a vacant property demolition program. And it it sort of accelerates the demolition of stuff by demolishing other stuff. I mean, you know, right?

Yeah. So you got to you got to think about stabilizing this stuff before you demolish it, because it's going to create more work for you in the future. Anyway, like PHA has ever given a shit about that. Oh, my God. No, they don't give a shit about anything. Sort of like treating gangrene with amputation before you've invented a turn. OK, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, that's a really good that's a really good analogy because I'm thinking about so the next couple of slides are some photos

that I took walking down the street about a half a block from my house, not even a full block. There's this example of a demolished row house next to a next to a dry cleaner and next to the row house that it was connected to and it doesn't even matter. You know, the situation where PHA demolishes the row house and then all of the rest of them are left to DK. You know, this is an example where the demolition was in progress

and is continuing to be in progress because the contractors. It's apparent that they didn't know what they were doing. You can I think there's an inquire article about this, but they did they did a very they started to remove the floor joists, which keep the buildings, you know, kind of laterally supported on your side. Yeah. Well, what was that? I said like anchored, so to speak. Yeah, basically, you know, you think about so.

So what you see there in terms of those vertical and kind of angled supports or things that they had to add back in after the fact. I think that, Raz, if you go to the next slide. Yeah, so this is all this is all bracing and stabilization that they've had to provide back into the building. Because when they removed all of the joists and and kept the basement and didn't fill in anything or do any kind of wall stabilization, that whole wall started to come down and the homeowners inside.

This was all detailed in an inquire article that I didn't look at. But the homeowners inside noticed the cracks and realized that there was massive stabilization damage. So they had to, you know, start a lawsuit to get this work done. And, you know, so often the. The difference is a matter of days, like between something like this being salvageable and relatively easy to do. And something that's just nearly impossible.

Totally fucked. Yeah. So so I think I think it's really important to underscore that there's actually another example that I could have taken a picture of that's a quarter of the block down the street from me. This one's all the way halfway down the block. And I don't live in North Philadelphia. I live in an area that has multimillion dollar houses. And knowing that this is kind of just something.

This is something that can have sold. Yeah, I'm already canceled for it. But this is this is the kind of thing that needs her own poops. Well, everyone, you know, eats their own poops. That's why you're friends with them. Yes, it's a, you know, I don't know about being a sexist idiot. Ready to go. I refuse to respond to the allegations of my haters.

So, you know, that's the best computer guy we've got. He's also a sexual deviant. Thank you. Yes. So anyway, it's me talking to Justin about we're getting a third host for the podcast way back. Thank you. He's also a sexual deviant. Right.

So it takes a real sicko to do something like this, but it happens more often than you think. You also see, see here, you got the face brick. You got the common brick. And you see the common brick is garbage shit. No one wants to look at that. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, yes.

How say I have wanted to demolish a row house, right? No. And I don't care. I'm not allowed to do it. Say I wanted to demolish a row house and I have a gun. OK, but I want to be responsible, right? And I want to demolish the row house in like the least worst way possible. How like you mainly slaughtering a cow.

Yeah, exactly. If I want to if I want to put the veterinary like captive bolt gun to a row house, all the way to demolish a robot. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You point the row house towards Mecca. So I think there's I think there's a there's a variety of ways to do it and every situation is different. And I don't have any kind of stamps, licenses, expertise or training.

But I have seen examples where what you essentially what's essentially been done is a giant concrete support that stabilizes the rest of the row. You know, you have to put in a massive piece of concrete engineering to hold up the houses. That's pretty common in Baltimore. Here in Philly, what I've seen more often, if there's been like proper stabilization is they just

they tear down the house, but they leave some of the joists in place. So you just have these naked joists hanging in space between the two the two existing row houses on the suppose like some sort of joy store. Yeah. Well, again, that's if you're doing it the right way. And that's an intervention that that essentially is a renovation of some kind at that point. I mean, it's a renovation of Theseus, but you still have something up in the. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you really do want to do that.

And and Justin, to your point, that stabilization, whatever it is, has to be very substantial, you know, it has to essentially pretend to be the building. So and I think if in the third picture, if you just want to hit that real quick, this is just a view looking down into the basement that they didn't clear out. But you can see where those notches are in the kind of middle of the wall. Those are where the joists have been taken out of their pockets. And that's the sort of thing where if you don't have those stabilizing units in and you don't do anything to stabilize them, really bad problems can happen.

Hmm. You know, I always love scaffolding and OSHA planks. They're like, it's always so safe. I know you do. And they're always they're always covered in some kind of masonry dirt. You know, it's just like, yeah, it's the best. It's the best. It's literally the best we got. You see this stuff and it's like like 40 or 50 stories in the air.

These people out there work construction. They still have bowls of steel, I got to say. Absolutely. So this is the twenty four hundred market block of Market Street. Twenty one. Twenty one. Excuse me. Looks great. Yeah, I know. Right. This is this is in 2012. Yeah. These these buildings are all still here.

These ones are not for reasons we'll get into. So Philadelphia had been declining in population for a pretty long time, right? From like, you know, the 60s to like the early 2000s, right? I mean, Philadelphia in like the 90s looked like New York in the 70s. Right. All the sort of historical factors that we all know about and have talked about before, but like on a slightly different timescale. Well, we got a new one to introduce in a second.

Oh, you know, and you can't, you know, once the population starts increasing in the early arts, you know, we were in a different building environment at this point, right? Which is traditional, small brick buildings. You can't do that anymore. We have skyscrapers now. Hmm. Thanks, Edmund Bacon or not Edmund Bacon, I guess. You have a different financing situation, right?

Because no one's going to finance like a small building in Center City. They want like a or like a small building at all because they want a big building. They want a big apartment building. They want maybe a big parking lot. Maybe want a big office building with big floor plates. Stuff full of like dot com companies. Yeah. And the people who work in those dot com companies. Bring your dog to work.

They fucking ask beer in the office, bullshit nonsense startups that I hate. Slide going down into the lobby. Yeah, you can you can slide right into your fucking 50 percent layoffs because your company just burns money like your traditional parcel. That's like 15 feet by 90 feet. That's no longer that's no longer economically feasible, right? That's something that, you know, you could support like a small building with a couple of apartments, most of them have like cross ventilation

because you can't do like a huge building there. You wouldn't be able to fit a modern chain restaurant in there, but maybe you could fit like a small independent one in there. That stuff, you can't do that anymore. Right. What are you complaining about? They got rid of the chilies on 38th and they got rid of the Applebee's in Center City. What are you mad about?

Mad that everything is an LA Fitness. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If you're trying to get a building financed, you want a big parcel of land, right? And that means you get a bigger building. You got bigger retail spaces, right? You only have one or two with like ellipticals and treadmills. Yeah, or you could put a Chipotle in there. Right. Or a Target. Yeah, you want you want smaller and shittier apartments, right?

Or larger office floor plates, right? You can finance a big and dumb building, but it'd be very difficult to finance like a smaller building, right? Right. And I think that in Philly, especially the way that this played out then and and still now is that you most of the streetscape looked like what you see here in this this image. Yes. A row of 19th century buildings, mostly intact,

maybe a parking lot, maybe a mid century, something or other. Some kind of infill on the commercial corridors. This is a very common scene. And and so for all the reasons that Justin's talking about, you know, this this is really common in Philadelphia. This is not this is aberrant in the development landscape for the rest of the United States, right? You're strode with the strip malls and the parking lots.

That those are large floor plates for the for the reasons that the financing works well. So so the drive to kind of acquire parcels in this format was really, really strong then. I think it's still probably pretty strong now. That's why we have a demolition program. You want to combine all these parcels so that you sell them to a shitty guy who's going to build a shitty building. Why, dude, we have a land bank, ostensibly.

Like, yeah, the land bank has done almost nothing. And I thought I thought if those progressive ideas on the table, then people would use them to their full extent and we would have a, you know, you know, a new Jerusalem, right? I think you're torturing a chip bag to death. That is not me torturing a chip bag to death. OK. Oh, that's me. Because people always complain about the noise of one or more of us eating

on these things. So I simply start myself nowadays. Liam, I'm not eating chips. I'm rolling a joint. Oh, OK. Joint you got the normal kind. So I don't know anything about. I'm not I'm not a drug person.

I don't know anything about weed. Would you like to be? No, thanks. I know what my fucking prefrontal cortex is like. I'm not letting anything loose on it. So don't mail Alice drugs. Yeah, I don't mail up to the P.O. Box either, please mail drugs.

The P.O. Box, this has been a message on behalf of the one federal law enforcement agency. We kind of respect the U.S. Postal Inspectors. Yeah, 99 percent, which should really try off. So the. So send me a postal inspector windbreaker. Yeah, do that.

Yeah, it's a two, actually. So this is a 2012 article by Inga Saffron, who is still the architecture critic at the at the Inquirer. This is what's her prize winning architecture. Prize winning. I think I think generally generally has generally has good takes. But every time she's been featured on this podcast, it was damn, it was a stinker of a take.

Yeah, we did the news one, right? Yeah, the two buildings matter one. No, I have a I have a lot of respect for Inga Saffron. Yeah. But every once in a while, something like this. She just shits out something pretty ugly. Yeah, you know, you got to write an article every week. I mean, come on, you're going to come up.

It's like it's like a bright. It's like doing a podcast. You know, that's right. Yeah. So I figured that this was just. You know, this is this is instructive because this is an interview with the owner of these buildings taken about, you know, two months before the permits are filed. And then, you know, six months before all of it

or five, five months before all this stuff starts to go down. But but Saffron is is talking about, you know, the articles or the the her column is called Changing Skyline. And it's all about how the city is changing all around. And, you know, she's a she's writing about the development, the construction. This this article goes into a lot of detail about how. The the main character of our story or one of them, Richard Basquiano, is finally ready to divest these parcels and and and put something

really important on them that will serve as a gateway to Market Street West. And finally, you know, you know, create the city that we've all been hoping for and yearning for and and this is, you know, the Philadelphia had been coming off of population decline for for 45 years, you know, the whole the whole landscape of this city was so markedly different. And I think it is I think it is really important and really interesting just to to start talking about the man himself and what what was going on there.

But but there's there's a really telling piece in this inquire article that I just want to mention where Basquiano is talking about acquiring all of the parcels on the block so it can be a complete redevelopment project. The only thing huge LA fitness. There's only there's only two things standing in his way from building the biggest LA fitness in the greater Philadelphia area. Those pesky kids in their community center. Yeah, exactly. The fire station.

The fire station fire safety earlier fire stations on this block. And number two, those greedy folks at the Salvation Army who hold a tiny little corner of this motherfucker is going to hate the Salvation Army for all of the wrong reasons and none of the right ones. Yes. Yes. So we do not endorse the opinions of the Salvation Army. No, no, we do not. No, we endorse the Utah Phillips song about the Salvation Army.

When they're an instance where like the Salvation Army was actually used as an army to go break strikes. Yes. Not even surprised. Well, yeah, they're they're they're great in the story. Just wait. But who's he? Also, they hate the gays. They hate the gays. Yes. But they're they're not they're not funny really here,

except for there's, you know, like they're they all call themselves like major and like commander pseudo military. Yeah, they got the stealing value, but like for evangelizing, which is one of the worst reasons why you can steal valor. But imagine instead if you were stealing valor, not as a war guy, but as a boxer guy. And so Richard Bastiano. All right.

So if you if you if you look him up, you'll mostly find obituaries in news articles about how back in the 1970s in Times Square, he owned all the porno theaters and the sex shops and the strip clubs that were in Times Square. Right. As the 1990s rolled around and all that real estate became insanely valuable. Baskiano sells it all. And moves to Philadelphia, where he starts

over here, he starts acquiring real estate in the next slide. The famous porno district from as featured in trading places. The historic porno districts. Yeah. But you can see we can see featured podcast landmark one meridian plaza back here. Oh, yeah. You guys know that weaker than song one great city. It's kind of like that. Winnipeg.

Yes. Yeah. Right. But Baskiano doesn't buy the Apollo. He he actually buys the forum. The porno theater is really a sort of a lost platform to time, I think. Oh, yeah. No, this is this is the kind of queer community space that you just like we just know we need. We need a queer community space that's not based around drinking alcohol. Immediately rebuilds the porno.

Step away from the lay of ours. We need a queer community space where the floor is sticky. Oh, God. Oh, God. I'm the guy who wipes down the loads. Oh, so this is the forum. This is this is the former this is the no longer extant, but historic porno theater was the last one. Looks great. Yeah, I say I found these I found these reviews online.

Oh, yeah. This is a photograph taken inside the forum. The seats, as you can see, are quite numerous. No one in his right mind would sit down in one of these seats. As they're beyond both. The cushions look as though they had been run over by a thousand cars. So make that crux and then dumped along the highway. They're beyond disgusting.

So it's just a bunch of guys standing up jerking off in there. That's like worse. I feel inside the dark canyon of the forum, mostly homeless men and crack users hang out here, a dangerous place lost souls and misfits. I don't like how it looks like the walls have also been blasted with like sort of shotgun velocity. It's artistically applied to just look like calm.

They did a really careful job. They got some guys. They got some guys with some serious velocity in there, you know? You know, when you're when you're doing it, when you're doing it in front of other people, you really got to. Got to get it going, you know? Oh, yeah, for sure. Got to show off.

Plus you're like your own crack as well. That's going to like, you know, this is particularly the sexual deviant drop. He's the best computer guy we've got. He's also a sexual deviant. Yeah, I got I got to call up the the front desk at the forum. Get my computer guy in this particular parcel. I believe it's been demolished up to this building with the cornice here. It's still there.

The rest of it is floating through this fucking theater, like hard space ship breaker, having to like try to get all of these seats into the barge without touching any of them. The rest of the rest of this block is now becoming, you know, one of those, you know, that new trend of like, you do buildings that look like a messed up Jenga tower, they have put one of those on there. And it looks like, yeah. I blamed I blamed turning torso for everything that just like it, you know,

I like turning torso, though. Yeah, I do, too. But I like say I like I like the velvet underground, too. I don't like the fucking imposters. Right. Yeah, no, it's only Jenga buildings now. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's that's all we need to talk about. I see in the notes here, it says this is part of a pattern that Bashiana learned from New York, used the allure and power of homosexuality

to attract the people who attract the people who gentrify neighborhoods. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, thank you. 100 percent accurate. I mean, I this is literally he literally took the playbook from New York City and brought it to Market Street West, which is the same kind of like extremely downtown place like the place where Inga Saffron is like, yeah, this is the gateway to Philadelphia's business district. And he was like, I'm going to make a jerk off parlors until we like sell it

for thirty million dollars or whatever. One hundred fifty million dollars. If you don't have the kind of gay people that you don't like, how are you going to attract the kind of gay people that you do like? It's true. Yes, it's true. This is true. And then the Trader Joe's went up across the street. So, you know, the pattern was right on time. And they don't even let you jerk off in there. I don't think.

Not anymore. I don't understand how anyone goes there. Like the lines are too long, you know, you can't even shop in there because the entire goddamn store is one big line for the register. Just imagining we're still talking about the forum. So, I think our story kind of starts with these two smaller buildings adjacent to the the Hogy City property. This is the book, excuse me, the Hogy City property.

Yeah. Yes. The site, the Hogy City site. We've got the Hogy City site and the Salvation Army site. And to a less important extent, the book, Ben, two and less gals. A Hogy is a sandwich. Yes. Yeah. Hogy is a meat, a long meat and lettuce sandwich. OK, so it's a long meat and lettuce sandwich store. Yeah. Yes. That's the Hogy City.

I see. OK, I'm sorry. Please, please continue. How have we done a hundred and seven episodes and you don't know what a Hogy is? Oh, I'm doing I'm doing a sort of sacrastic dialogue where I make you feel bad about your city's culture by asking you to explain it to me in normal terms. All right. You're from Glasgow, Scotland, shut the hell up.

It's fine. It's been a minute since we've done a Glasgow disaster. And I'm trying to what are you going to throw a bottle of buck fast in my head? You're going to beat me with bucky? Is that your plan? No, it sucks. The Hogy's and the disaster are only nominally related. I see. They're not the Hogy's themselves at this location, at least we're pretty sure we're fine.

Right, Justin, based on historical research, we've been able to uncover. So I don't know about the quality of Hogy City while it was still Hogy City. What I can say is that the reviews of Hogy City after this incident of the few Hogy City locations remaining are not good. Oh, it's a chain. OK, yes. Yeah, but there's another there's another weird thing about Philly, where like a bunch of businesses are like we only have four.

We have four locations and they're all like within 20 minutes driving distance of each other just here in Philadelphia. Yes. Um, well, you couldn't bring Hogy City to Harrisburg because, you know, Philadelphia is the Hogy City. This is true. All right. I won't argue that. I'm very into, by the way, how ornamented the Bookbin to a erotic Emporium building.

Such a good building. It's really good. It's a really, really good building. It's all terracotta. I mean, it's it's very pretty. It was important. What are they used to be? Did we know? Well, here it says she for furniture. There's some there's some speculation that it was like a music store. Roz, if you go to the next slide.

Um, some of the terracotta work here, I think. You were there when we were looking this up, right? It was like the Atlantic, Atlantic terracotta factory. It's Atlantic terracotta. Yeah, they went to New York City for the terracotta. They couldn't they couldn't stay with the local boys at what should we call it? Yeah, it's got some vaguely musical motifs on it.

Yeah. Yeah, they didn't use Armstrong Conkling terracotta. Yeah, Armstrong Conkling. Yeah. No relation. Right. So anyway, it's a nice building. It looks really good. It's all demolished now. It's all demolished. Yeah. But didn't they salvage some of the terracotta? Or no.

I want to say I want to say that. So one of the things that comes out in this case is that there was salvage that was done. I don't remember about this. Or if it was just that a salvage yard had written in that that was where it was from, that they they had a catalog. I forget. But anyway, yeah.

So so basically, Bascano starts acquiring this this entire row of parcels, right? Right. The empty lot, the parking garage, these two, these two buildings. Lake Owl and fucking book into. Yes. And and the Hoagie City complex. The there's a parking lot. The Hoagie City complex.

Hoagie City complex. Yeah, the sacred precinct of the Hoagie City complex. Here's a couple of better names for it. This is the same. Come back to the slides. You see this big, this four story building here. Nice brick building, got a cornice on it. You know, it's fine.

That's the same building. They just added some panels on the outside. Yeah, the Grenfell solution. Got you. They're not even like insulating or anything. They're just panels, right? No, they just make it look mid century modern. And right in front of it, you can see the trolley entrance here. That goes to the 22nd Street.

Trolley station, 22nd Street, right? Yeah, I don't remember that shit. Yeah, Aussie platters, jumbo steaks, seafood, salad, ice cream. Do not get the seafood can can't can't can't advise that enough. This is this is a review of the the remaining Hoagie City location on Hunting Park Avenue, which is there are no hoagies served here. Right. So so for this for this set, right,

he's he's just trying to keep it as a parking lot or a set of parking structures until it can get redeveloped. So the building, even though there's other buildings on this block that he owns, and there's the parking lot, the first set of buildings that are scheduled to cut or set to go down from the demolition. He kind of works his way from, you know, from the inside or from the middle of the block to the outside of the block, right?

But I think that we're going to we're going to start talking about the. Yeah, the whole the whole actual event, right? Yes. Right. Because I see on the very end, the Salvation Army thrift store there. Yes. So this is this is another common thing on the commercial corridor, right? You've got the one story building that's the stand in for whatever three to five story building used to be there.

They got knocked down or significantly reduced. Yeah, sometimes it's just like the like the first story of like a three or four story building that they just they just cut off the top couple stories. The building left the bottom floor. There was one big building like that. It was called the Gerard Place that was over by Redding Terminal. And that was I want to say it was the Snellenbergs Department Store. Oh, yeah. The first two stories on it.

Yeah, they they they cut off like the top seven stories and just left the first two. And then they put low rent businesses in there. And then when they were demolishing it as they were pulling off all the metal facade, you could see all the old terracotta back there. And it was like, ah, it used to be good here. Yeah, they just covered it up because because no, because they wanted it to look like a fucking waffle house. Like literally, that's that's like what it is.

All of these buildings, yeah, are some flavor of that. But that means that they're in horrible states of their own disrepair. Right. And so that's that's kind of the other side of the coin is that these are they're they're the last the last vestiges or the kind of like first stages of a temporary building at this point. And so that's the other thing with the Salvation Army building is that it's it's not in and of itself in good shape, right? But but none of the buildings on this block are in good shape

because the porno guy is holding out until he's ready to flip the neighbor. And they say porn isn't a danger to society. Well, this is why this is why they invented the Internet so you can watch pornography in the privacy of your own home. That's right. And now you Google big boobs, you get two trillion hits. That guy's out of business. I can stand up joking off anywhere I want. Thank you, Alice.

You know, and this is what they took from us in I love the idea of the past stopping, stopping at Hogy City to get a Hogy and then making your way to the taking my Hogy into the forum and getting 50 diseases. Just are you are you guys into meatballs, too? It's like indeterminate, which disease is originated in which place? Actually, more into Italians. All right. Yeah. Oh, well, it's OK.

You're very pretty, Jude. That's not the problem. The problem is that you specifically, Jude, are patient zero now from eating your Hogy at the fuck shack. All right. Look, it's you can let me. I'll leave you so much. Uh, hi, it's Justin in post production. This is the part of the podcast where my co-hosts make jokes on the subject

of gentlemen's relish for about five minutes straight with no respite. If you do not wish to hear those jokes or they would be upsetting to you, please feel free to skip five minutes ahead, starting from now. All right, I got bad news as the showrunner here is I have to use the restroom. I'll be right. Oh, well, you're just about to get back on track. Yeah. All right. Well, Ross is going to edit this out. So, June, I got to get some water.

I'll be right back, too. For fuck's sake. Look, I'm sorry. You know this from last time. This is my favorite part of the show, the part where you got you two just do the banter. It's great. Yeah, we just hang out. Yeah, it's fine.

Definitely. We're going to edit this out. Outside of the forum is where we're going to go. Yeah, it's a nice meatball. Do you really not do? Did you know what a hokey was or I knew what a hokey was? I thought you did. You know, seemingly everything.

So I mean, what are we going to do? What we're going to do? Thank you, by the way, is we're going to go into the forum and we're just going to like stand in front and we're just going to like turn back with a care of like UV flashlights and just see what's going on. What are you guys doing? Hey, what's what's going on? Hands on your own work.

Just introducing some luminal spray into the equation. Stop fucking touching each other. You're always supposed to touch yourselves. Man, if you genuinely if you did like a luminal spray in the forum, I think you would blind yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, one of those like standing on the surface of the sun. One of those laser matrices, but they all get interrupted by just.

Gallants of come really. Yeah, yeah, because I don't think there's any un-combed upon surface. They have come everywhere. Like you could have achieved the same effect by like immersing the whole room in come the same way that they did the Mary Rose and Seawater. Yeah. You know, it's it's a sort of slow, sort of come impregnation. If you like with the with the effects of come on surfaces is after like

and I'm not talking about like just like does it eat because it's salty. We got it. Do you remember the studies? We can't do this again. I remember the jar. I was like, too well. We just can't have this happen again. I think it was a valid line of like structural mechanical engineering

inquiry to. Yep. Thanks, Alice. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I think we can and we like. We can investigate the effects of come on different surfaces. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Different different like four Chan uses gamer chair on the sides. You know, the body graveyard? What's the what's the university? Come graveyard. Yeah, exactly. We need to buy a porno theater and and and like this is actually a research porno thing.

Yeah, we'll get a bunch of government money for it. It'll be great. Yeah, we're paying you to for your participation. We need to come on as much stuff as possible. That sounds like a great way to get like a wide variety of strange human mutants. We're gloves, buddy. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

I mean, no one ever said science was prissy. No. No, I will just mention at this point, I did have an ex who went in the forum. Shout out to Kylie and although we haven't talked. I hope you're doing all right. But yeah, she said it was fucking disgusting in there. You know what I'm saying? So I can only imagine I can only imagine how bad it actually was.

But anyway, so we're we're ready to to go through it long and excruciating time for another like a couple of hours. I mean, you will continue to talk about calm most likely. Right. Just concrete units of masonry. Mm hmm. Oh, yes. Building an enormous calm over the fucking reactor.

Yeah, that's that's a good one. I like that. Yeah, that's funny. But the concrete arcs are the load bearing walls. No, I mean, what was the firing walls? Is what was what was good? Yeah, they have to bear load. I mean, it's just how it goes.

We were just talking about the guy who bears the loads. Yeah, the loads. I am so sick of profit. All right. So I guess the bomb is going to get you out of that jam, honestly. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these.

So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but, you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes. So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So what we have on screen is a permit. It's a permit for building, but yes, but it's not a permit for building. It's a permit for unbuilding the demolition permit.

Yeah. Yeah. So this is what the demolition permit looks looked like in Philadelphia at the time. You want to fake one of these so you can demolish whatever you want. Go ahead. We have an engineering stamp for it. It's just showing up at City Hall. Like, yeah, I've got a permit taking a sledgehammer to the front door. No, I have a permit. So well, I did try and demolish City Hall, but they realized they didn't have enough money to do it.

Yeah, they couldn't. They couldn't do it. It's too. It's way too fucking big. What a bankrupted the city, right? Yeah. Which wouldn't have been economically wise. Yeah, no, and they would have been so stupid for traffic using. Yeah, no, they were going to they were going to put a traffic circle around the City Hall Tower and then get rid of the building part.

It's dumb as shit. That's hysterical. Do you guys want to talk about this or no? I mean, I mean, I'm talking to you, I guess. You want to talk about comments then? So what does this have to do with come? Right. So so to come and destroy a building in Philadelphia, first, you have to go down to the basement of a place called the Municipal Services Building

and talk to somebody there who may or may not be able to answer your question. And regardless of whether or not they can answer the question, they hate you and they want you to know that they hate you. They're so hard, dude. I used to work for the city and people would like very rarely come to our office. And I worked in City Hall and be like, I have a question about, like, you know, this this thing I'm supposed to pay and I would just be like, kill yourself. You're not that.

Yeah. And compared to compared to like the basement of Municipal Services, you had a sunny disposition and like a determination hole. I had to be payrolled down there, dude. It was fucking horrible. But yeah, down in the basement of MSP, there's all kinds of like angry people, you know, because you have to stand in line for all these permits, right? Maybe you hire someone to stand in line for you from working underground. It's actually like it's pretty common at this point to hire someone to stand in line

for you, right? Oh, yeah. Go do it personally. And, you know, that's where a huge amount of permits you have to go apply for them there. If you have to pay a water bill, number one, God help you. Number two, you got to go do it down there. That's one advantage of renting in Philly is you don't have to deal with the water to park because it's so it's such a like incongruous mess that the landlord would rather just like swallow it. Also, the water is so cheap.

Yeah. Standing in line for 18 hours to pay like a twenty dollar bill for the year. Yeah, that that's that's that's that's how you were just getting around to like some certain services being paid online when I worked there. They've just heard of the internet down there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a sort of a sort of a scaven situation in the basement here. And yeah, you got down into the water department and it's just a bunch of like

ancient Roman guys building. Not cannot emphasize that enough. It's just hot molten down there. Hot molten lead down there. They got just big fats of it. Greetings, traveler. You try to explain the internet to them and they only understand Latin. They want payment in like gold coins, coins.

Yeah, Denari or Riley. Yeah, so getting permits in Philly, it's it's a fun, fun experience. So it sounds like crazy, but you got to do it, especially if you're going to remove a building. But back in 2013, the permits just kind of looked like this, even though you had to sit in line for eight hours. The it says building permit on it, even though the permit is for complete demolition of a four story building, it says the permit requires the following inspections, initialize under slab slash floor, pre final slash

wall board, framing slash close in slash final. But since that was just doing them in the wrong order, it's fine. That was just in there. That was that's just on the form. And it doesn't really apply to the demolition of a building. One of the really interesting things about like the permitting system is even to this day, you know, if you go look up these permits online, which you can do now, they'll say, see attached plans.

Then the plans are not attached. Yeah, there's no way to actually look at see attached plans. That's all that's all only like on paper. And you have to like go and talk to someone at the city to go see them. If there's something to say that it just says. This is what we have the permit to do demolish thing. Yeah, no, the doesn't even say demolish. It says demo demo demo thing.

No, there's another there's another thing in this where I don't know if it's common anymore, but back then the estimated cost of the demolition, they wrote in $10,000, which presumably saves some permit fees. Yes, but the bid they the architect who was supervising the project put in got four bids for the work. They came in between four hundred ninety nine thousand dollars and one hundred and twelve thousand dollars.

They went with the one that was for one hundred and twelve thousand dollars. This architect is a Plato Maranacos. Yes, sounds very Greek. Yeah, one Greek guy going down there to talk to all the ancient Romans. Yes, it explains. They're going to like to use of them on logic. It's not the same, but you know, it's kind of similar. Cross-compatibility.

Yeah, right. It's about to say he's he's in the Hellenistic era. So the other thing is that after like the city undertakes a huge investigation after this collapse and what they find says that the permits didn't require any details showing how the demolition was to proceed. Specific information such as diagrams, descriptions of work, safety procedures, number of personnel needed and equipment to be used were also not required. So it's not even that like, like, like, yes,

then they didn't really have like a firm plan for that was going to be done. But but the city wasn't looking for it, you know. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of like one of the things about like city, like permits and stuff is that it's like, you know, the people who review an issue of these permits, they're not John Doherty in this case, they're not they're they're not architects, they're not engineers. They're not, you know, and you sort of you sort of assume that if you've got a licensed contractor or architect or engineer, like you do like a quick sanity check on the plans,

if they're provided, otherwise you just say, hey, this is probably fine, especially if it's demolition, which, you know, the city is pretty pretty lax about, I will say. Yeah, I mean, we've seen the buildings, like nobody's fucking John Doherty, the the plan examiner here is not examining the porno too hard. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, what's the worst thing? What's the worst thing that's going to happen to building falls down? That's what it's supposed to do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So, so the LNI inspector does go to visit the site on February 12th, this permit's filed on the first, he, you know, he goes out there to inspect the proposed demolitions and he puts up the notices of demolition on the windows and distributes notices to them that the building's going to be demolished. He comes back, I guess, 10 or 12 days later to note that work hadn't started on any of the buildings and that's just kind of how he leaves it for a while. Yeah, he's at capacity at this point. And so, frankly, you know, I forget how many people were actually working in this department at the time, but it wasn't, it wasn't a large number and it certainly wasn't large enough to supervise

the demolitions in the city. And they all live in a basement, like they're all fucking dying from vitamin D deficiency. Right, exactly. They're all in sort of, they're all down in the basement and they're watching images on the cave wall. They're pointing at buildings and saying, that's the demolition that's happening. What, going to the shadows in the cave, Paul knows this. Oh, that's the best part. So if, so I think if you, if we go to the next slide, basically, just to give you some sense of like the process that Philadelphia has, there weren't any further inspections on the site. No other looks at it from the inspector

until there was a 311 complaint that was sent on May 6th. Three months later. Yeah, when was that last one? Yeah, yeah, every 20 months later. So and I can't stress enough, these buildings, you can see City Hall from them. Yeah, like they're literally right there. They're right in front of a goddamn trolley station. I mean, right. I mean, yeah, you see here, like you got the little demolition notice, right? And that that's all you got. I having lived next to a building that was being demolished. The other thing, the city does send you a nice notice that says the building next to you will be demolished on or about some date, right? And when that,

when I got that notice, I also caught the notice for the building next door flying through the wind at me because it's just a piece of paper they put on the stoop. Yeah. No, the building, if there was a demolition notice, it's like on a vacant lot, you're supposed to post that on like a piece of plywood. But if you don't have that, you just don't post it. And then also the contractor doesn't have a piece of plywood. Just go into your inventory and craft something real quick. Sorry, that was a that was a figure of speech that might be. But so during somebody emails 311 and goes there's clearly it's being demolished in a manner that's unsafe. Yeah, there's a lack of safety equipment for workers. There's no plan to prevent walls or facade materials

from falling on pedestrians. They're just kind of knocking stuff out of the building. And again, this is in a really prominent area. So this is this is three months later is kind of the first time that the inspector gets wind about it. And he what what what happens is that he just goes and the email that that the 311 auto generates that gets sent to him just says that they don't have the notices up. Oh, Jesus Christ. So he goes to the building sees that he sees that the notices are up and he says, OK, close this out. This ticket's closed. So in the meantime, the bridge remember the bridge collapse in Pittsburgh. And the ticket was like was changed to closed. Just a sort of mock as red. Right. I would have closed that ticket, too. I would be like,

it would no no reason to keep this open if the bridge actually collapsed. That particular condition has evolved into a new condition. Bridge, not. Yeah. So so L L and I. L and I's involvement is mostly a story of L L and I wasn't there until they got a complaint. And then they showed up and they didn't really do anything on the other side of his life. On the other side, we have the we have the property owners who as as I mentioned in the 2000, you know, in the 2012 article, Basiano says that Salvation Army is playing hardball. And that it's really unfortunate they won't sell to him because obviously he has the

connections that he needs to get the government grants to redevelop this place into something really nice, which the whole article is such nonsense, you know, when you think about it that way. But a significantly nicer porno theater. Yeah, exactly. We're going to put a really good two. We're going to we're going to build a LA fitness but with porn. It's going to be a porno theater, but they sell food. But you wish you could get hit in this some kind of upscale porno theater, like an Alamo draft house, but for porno. But for duty. This is too close to reality. Matter of time. Yeah, much of time. So like, you know, the the top.

You open a porno theater. Oh, I was going to open crazy Liam's porn and porium and computer parts warehouse. I think I was sure I get the funding for it. You know, I mean, a gastroporn. He's the best computer guy we've got. He's also a sexual deviant. Thank you. There's that place in Kitty Hawk that does like porn and biscuits. Excuse me. You mean Titty Hawk? No, it's it's a there's a porn and biscuits place in Kitty Hawk. Yeah, I know North Carolina. But yeah, well, no, I know I I heard the joke and I decided to disregard it. Well, a lot bad. So back to the porno. Yes. Back to where they're definitely not having sex at the Salvation Army. Yes, they basically this back and forth starts

to happen between the New York Development Corporation that Baskiano runs and the Salvation Army headquarters in New York City, where they're both emailing back and forth about this building. And but but they do it. They do it in this way where every every single communication just breaks down with the next one. So and I think this has a lot to do with it with this history of trying to buy the building and accusing each other of being greedy or whatever. But but when when they get the email that's saying, hey, just just so you know, it's it's February 4th. We sent our architect out to do a survey and prepare for the demolition. And he found that we're going to need to access your roof. Your roof is like dangerous and unstable in these areas. And you

should address it. Also, this chimney is going to come down. Yes, right, right back here. That's that's that's one of the big issues. Yeah. So so this the report, the text of the report is on the is on the slide. And it and and it really is this, you know, based on our, you know, based on our field inspection and engineering judgment, it is our conclusion that the structural condition of the subject building is barely sound and extreme state of neglect and disrepair. You know, so I think that this is supposed to be a scary report to be like, hey, you guys should sell us your building. So it'll be easier for us to knock everything down. But either either way, the Salvation Army says like, hey, okay, okay, cool. We need to talk

to our lawyers about this. We want to make sure that we protect our investments, like they put that in an email. We'll get right on it. Yeah, they're just kind of like shaking their heads to each other. And if you look at these, if you look at these conditions, they mentioned like, okay, number one, two, and three are all the same thing, which is you need a new roof. Right. Yeah, whatever. Number four, repoint brick. I mean, it's a one story structure. That's not a big deal. Number five, aluminum facing is missing sections. Again, not a huge deal. Not really, not really the hokey city's concern. You know, you know, and then what plywood facing is exposed needs to be replaced. It's plywood, you know, water damaged interior plaster. I can't see the

interior. I don't know what that was. You know, damage face brick, damage, no D there. Interesting. Along the sidewalk. But number nine, roof drain net connected. Alright, again, that's a 30 minute job. Yeah, none of these things seem to be like major issues, especially on a building of this site. Right. You know, I mean, replacing the roof, okay, that's a big issue. And that's the source of a lot of the other problems. But once you replace that roof, you'd be fine on this for 20, 30 years. Right. The replacement of the roof is actually the solution to all the problems, because you would do all of the flashing and the drainage and the other things too. Yeah, exactly. But regardless, contractors are a job that big. Basically,

the whole thing's going to be done. And regardless, one story building, it's not a big job. Yeah. And I think this is this is just as much like a FYI, we're going to need to access this wall to take this down the right way. And you need to you need to talk to us about that. And like, if I can if I can underscore one thing here, it's like, if you have a neighbor next to your property, even if you really don't like them, and there's some kind of work that needs to be done that needs to involve them, you need to talk to them no matter what, you can't you can't not do that. What if I'm a small bean and I have anxiety? Too fucking bad. What if I literally have a mental health condition that prevents me from

not demolishing my neighbor's house? I have a mental illness that requires me to take down brick walls. The whole Salvation Army collectively is a small being. Except when dealing with unions or gay people. Right. So, so then, right. So the the the email is like February 5. And then they go MIA till like May 10, right? So it's it's not it's not really like clear. I assume that what's happening in this kind of interim time period is that everybody starts asking everybody else when the hell is this work going to be finished, right? And and and a standoff that is just kind of at a at a no communication type of impasse with with your neighbor about

a demolition decision like this, like, that's the kind of thing where I think on on a like planning site or something like that, it doesn't seem like a big problem until it becomes one because while while all of this is happening, what what comes out and like the kind of court documents after the fact is that, you know, right, there's there's the contractor who's not really qualified to do the job. And on top of this, Basquiano is coming out to the job site every day to micromanage Griffin Campbell and anybody else who's there. And and so great, you have the porno king just looking over your shoulder. You have the 90 year old box like boxer cosplay porno guy who's trying to tell like the two the two underpaid construction

workers how to how to demolish a building, right? Like, and so and so on top of that, the one person who may be in like an actual realistic supervisory role or like, like knowledgeable place is the architect who's not really paying attention to this one piece of it because from his concern, you know, all he has to do is get the approval from from from Salvation Army and then and then the contractors can do it the right way. But what happens in the interim is this situation where the contractors start to do the demolition work and create massive problems while doing so. Yeah, because there's an extent to which, you know, if you're in a if you're in a design professional position, you know, there's there's you should, to some extent, trust your

tradesman, right? They generally know how to do a job, right? But when there's like a big structural problem like this, maybe maybe you should this is your job. This is where you have to intervene, you know, you need to you need to be on site, direct, literally directing work, not driving by and taking pictures and making phone phone text calls, which I think is what the architect did in this case. And I think that just in terms of the other kind of just weird breakdown things that sort of happened, like May 15 is the day when basically basically things things don't start moving until they until they do, right? So on the two on the two shorter buildings, like those really start to get demolished around May, like May 6 through through the 10th. And

they're actually, you know, like, like you can, like I mentioned, the first complaint comes in May 6, which means that the work was being done probably around the beginning of May, where they start to demolish these buildings and start to kind of take them apart, not Hogy City, but the other two, right? And clearly, whatever they're doing is crazy in one way shape or form. But it seems like one of the big parts of the plan was for them to recoup the costs of this demolition by salvaging and scrapping as many of the materials as they possibly could. Oh, good. This is this sounds like the run up to a job well done. Oh, it gets. Yeah. We talk about the that we talk about how they came in $400,000 under everyone else's bids. Right. Yeah. No. So the

it's supposed to cost about a half a million dollars to to demolish a building like this. They they they quoted a hundred and a hundred and 12,000. And then on the demolition permit, they list that it's going to cost $10,000. Like there's no like the money is just it's just not possible. Right. So the other thing that happens is that the city planning commission chair gets CC it on one of these emails right before all of the communication breaks down. But sort of a covering your ass sort of. Yeah, the emails like this nonsense must end before someone is seriously injured or worse. Those are headlines. None of us want to see or read. And it's a good thing that it's a good thing that city planning is such a powerful and

especially here office here in Bella. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So with the ability to keep up with all of your emails, no, no need to do anything. So he read this email. And then a couple minutes later, he sees another email coming in that somebody's like, hey, yeah, we'll handle it. Don't worry. And then he doesn't work. And then he doesn't worry about it. And so that's kind of that's kind of where all of the parties stop talking to each other and all of the good everything kind of goes to let's just call it a different mode palette. Yeah, something like that. This is the only picture that I have of it. But by May 13, the building already has the thing where like you can only see it on scans

of government documents. Yes. And so what what you see here is that the two smaller buildings were knocked down. Yes. And those only have like 20 foot joists in them. And so they're they're a little bit easier to kind of navigate the pieces of kind of moving them around even if you're demolishing them in kind of an unsafe way. Everything's falling in on itself. There's nothing that's kind of actively in business that would preclude you from or cause you to have a problem. A troubled city tries to move on with the loss of Legal. Right. They've ripped the roof off Hokey City. You can see the light coming in through the windows. Right. But then there's the Tenacious Hokey City building, which causes its own problem,

because that's that's a double wide line. So there's a there's a line of structural support columns that's running through the center of that building. And the the wooden joists are only about 18 feet wide. But they have, you know, that's really a Jenga piece where these two joists are working together with the center piece to to hold the whole building up. And what they start to do is remove all of the floors and start to remove the joists from the front of the building. What they what they were what they should have done if they were doing it the right way, this is this is May 13th, and the building kind of stays in the stasis for a little bit. If they were doing it the right way, they would have done an engineering study,

they would have erected scaffolding all around the building, they would have rented a boom lift, which would have cost them only $4,224.21. But they thought that that would actually just be too expensive. So they didn't do that. They had an excavator on site that they used to demolish the building instead. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And the the other the other thing is like so the I guess the inspector finally sees that that buildings have are gone now. And so he comes back to the site on May 14th through 16th. He doesn't see any of those violations. Like I said with the things are up because the things are gone. And then OSHA inspects the site on May 15th and also finds no violations, which I can only guess is because nobody let them in. I like I

really am or perhaps the building wasn't far along. But this is this is what the building looked like. It already didn't have a roof. So, you know, allegedly, the building inspector specifically told the contractor that the demo would get be would get done brick by brick. The the contractor agrees to this. But but we don't really have any official records of any of this stuff. And he takes his life shortly after this incident happens. So we'll never do. So that's that's May 13th. And then in the in the following couple weeks, it looks like this is when that that joist removal starts to happen that really puts the building into into a really precarious place. And this goes back to the whole kind of timeline or people breathing down each

other's necks, because it's not really clear to me. And there's no real records of the actual strict timeline of kind of how things move. But by by June 2, they're on to the exterior walls sometime between May 20 and June 2 is when they do this choice removal. And then June 2, they start the actual exterior construction. Yeah. So I think if we go to the next slide, that is this video works, this is a video from that Sunday, which is always a great day to be doing construction work. This is the demolishing the building. So they're so one of the people is hosing the building down with water to prevent dust. And then you can see an excavator, which is parked basically right in front of the Salvation Army. And the arm of that excavator is just kind

of tearing big parts off the building. Jesus, fuck. They even closed off the street. No, no. You can see the contractor is on the far side of the trolley entrance spraying the water across the trolley entrance onto the building. That entrance. Yeah, you're just getting hosed if you don't get a brick to your head. That is my question. I'm not certain that the trolley entrance is closed or open. I know that the thrift store was open. Yeah, the thrift store was open. The trolley entrance was definitely open, Justin. I mean, I would still use it. Yeah, so yeah, it's not it's not the blue light isn't flashing, right? So yeah, just walk onto the the hose spray. It's fine.

Right. So yeah, no, so there it goes. The Hogi City sign comes down. No, and you can just see worse than the fucking Saddam statue. So so you can see the excavator arm is because the because the subway station is over is right directly in front of it. They kind of can't get the excavator in there. And they know they know that so they have to kind of do it off to the side, right? There was a safe demolition plan that was originally proposed back when Salvation Army and Bascana were talking, but that never got finalized and no access agreement was formalized for the roof. And so basically, basically between June 2nd and June 5th, when the collapse happens,

they the the contractors hire like an addition, a bunch of additional crew members to just come in and start demoing stuff. But because of the salvage plan, the the joists were between sold between six dollars and eight dollars a piece, just so you know, these are massive frames of old growth timber, you know, about 18 feet wide and four to six feet or four to six inches tall. We're talking like old growth timber. We're talking like 18 feet long, like six. Six dollars. Yeah. Six dollars or eight dollars. Eight dollars. It was on a wholesale. Eight dollars. The completely intact ones were eight dollars. The ones that they pulled out of the wreckage as they were destroying the buildings

were only six. Eight dollars. Eight dollars. Eight dollars. Eight dollars. Eight dollars. And they didn't rent. How many dollars? They didn't rent the they didn't rent the other thing because it was going to be forty two hundred dollars. Jesus, they could have probably sold those for like a hundred times that. Crazy. No, and you can't. And again, that that kind of stuff is so hard to source. Eight dollars. Eight dollars. So, yeah, everybody was complaining how unsafe the site was. Everybody was everybody who was there like had done demolition before. Walked into this building, saw that there were a bunch of joists missing and were like, no, I'm not doing any more of of this. But.

I'm going to go and do a lot of some joists, though. Yeah. But between the text from Maranacos and like. Give me all of those. Give me every single one of those. Yeah. I'll just put the building back up. Just keep them. Yeah, seriously. Like so much. But it's so much building material. And it's like the cheapest building ever. Any ever new one has ever built. Yeah. So eight dollars is probably what those joists cost when they were new. Not adjusted for inflation. Yeah. And it's just like that just goes to show what the stakes actually were in this situation and how none of this should have happened. Very small amounts of money. Very small amounts of money. And there are hundreds of joists in

this building. Like eight dollars a piece is in the grand scheme of things like, you know, moving a lot of them. The whole thing is just very sad. So anyway, over the night of June 4th is when a lot of additional work happens in the middle of the night with this extra crew. There's about eight people there. And one of the worst details is just like one of the construction workers testifies in one of these reports that if all eight of those people had just been focused on hand removing the wall that was connected to the Salvation Army, they could have gotten it down in time. But by the time the night comes up and they've spent all night on ladders on the roof of the Salvation Army building, there's still at least a story of

wall remaining. So instead of removing all of this wall, what they're doing is removing joists to sell them. So if you go to the next slide, how many joists are there? Oh, probably hundreds. Yeah, they're about they're spaced about every 18 inches. And that's a couple X boxes. And what they were able to remove was only the joists from the first 60 feet of the building or so. Oh, pathetic. For Market Street. Yeah, truly amateur behavior. Do you want that? Do you want those $8 or not? Right? Yeah, I guess I do. So 9 14 a.m. on the morning of June 5th, 2013, the Campbell Tex Maranacos and says, Hey, we got the wall down. Don't worry. I feel like I should worry, boys. Justin, you want to go next?

Do you go to the Roz? Do you fall asleep? Justin, do you want to do you want to get do you want to take the next one? Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I have something to this. I'm too old to understand what that means. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to wake him up. Roz. I'm here. I just went to the kitchen to grab a beer and I came back. Oh, do you want to read the next part of this this this thing? Sure. It 9 14 a.m. on the morning. Not that part. The next part. The next the next the next paragraph. Okay. Wednesday, June 5th, 2013 at approximately 1041 a.m. while Sean Benchap was demolishing the eastern wall with a pry bar. Eastern War Wall is the one closest to the parking garage here.

Correct. The eastern wall with a pry bar in the jaws of the excavator. The rear of the machine hit the western wall, which then partially collapsed onto the Salvation Army thrift store. Yeah. Oh. So that was that was when everything hit. Barciano was on site and fled when the building collapsed. Yeah, that was another great detail is that he was there. His wife drove him there every morning and he was on site and he was on site when the building collapsed and then he was gone as soon as the wreckage was incredible. Discretion rarely being the best of parts of Valor. Yeah. It's it's so it's so like, you know, there's a video that we didn't include that's

that's a septa bus that drives by just as this thing is happening. And it's just a con. It's just so scary, right? Like one minute, everything's fine. And then the next minute, everything is dust. And it just just this is such a tragedy that could and should have been averted. And none of it, none of it went right, you know, because you're dumping like a story's worth of wall on top of the Salvation Army. Yeah, with a fucked up roof. So this is even if the roof was fine, all that masonry would have just gone. It's way too heavy. Yeah, no, if you look at so this picture shows what the what the kind of rear of the Hogy City building looks like. And that's like

just just to give you an idea that, you know, the wall was only a the wall was two stories tall in the front of the building, but it went all the way up to four stories in the back and it all fell like this was not it wasn't just limited to the people who were shopping in the Salvation Army store, which was open at the time, it was like, you know, anybody who was out on that street was could have gotten hit by something. Yeah, he could have got no problem. And if you look at the next image, it really shows like getting hit with a wall of bricks is not a little bit of fun time. Yeah, generally speaking, getting getting domed in the head by getting hit right on the noggin by a brick is not good. And

when there's many bricks, you're probably going to die. Yeah, each one does like one hit point damage, but you've got like 100 HP. Yeah, actually, like D&D rows, you've got like four HP. Yeah, like four HP. Yeah, you hit by the head on you can get on a head by level one thrift shopper. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So all the level one thrift shoppers who were here did not really make it. There were six people who were six people were killed. I think two two people were pulled out of the wreckage and like needed serious hospitalization. And like I said, legs amputated. Yeah. Well, and I think one of them was the daughter of a Penn professor. So this became kind of high

profile and in a in a bunch of different ways. But yeah, I mean, this is just one of those things where it's like there's so there's so many different individual elements to it that are just so like either if somebody knew what they were doing, they weren't paying attention. And if they didn't know what they were doing, they weren't paying attention. And the city, the developer, the demolition contractor, the Salvation Army. Yes. Yeah. No. And I think this is like, you know, it's very easy to think about buildings as permanent, but they're only permanent until they're not permanent until they're painted brick. Yeah. It was going fine until the guy with the pry bar painted one brick. Yes. It's unfortunate.

But that's what happens when you paint the brick falls over. Yeah, instantly. Yeah, don't do that. Yeah. And I think I think the part the part about salvaging materials just just add such a tragic piece to it. The part of the part about the part about the architect and the and the developer both just kind of serving as these outside forces who are breathing down, you know, their workers next basically being like, when is this building coming down? When is this building coming down? I paid you a lot of money for this, you know, right? When in reality, it's fucking not that much, you know. Yeah, exactly. And I think that, you know, so in the aftermath of all this stuff, the only people who were charged with anything were Griffin Campbell and Sean Benchop,

you know, the two contractors. The guy with the actual pry bar and the contractor, yeah. When in reality, every single safety check was missed here. And the worksite conditions were actively unsafe partly partly because of ignorance, but then also because because of just profit motive, you know, and and and the way that the way that that shows in just especially Boskianos actions, you know, he had to pay he had to pay money that I think the suit probably led to a decline in his life. But, you know, it didn't it he didn't he was never going to go to jail for this. And there's so many people who should have done something even though, you know. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's just a huge failure in the chain of command. But it's like so

it's so common in this city, like you have just these these construction projects that are almost completely unmonitored. Right. You know, we have a lot of regulated of demolitions. Even after this, where where people were demolishing buildings like in Fishtown and just knocking over houses and people were injured. I don't think killed, but I know that happened at least a couple times in Fishtown a year after. Well, we'll get to this a bit later, but I worked for the city when this happened. I worked for Philadelphia Housing Authority, like the year after this happened. And they were, you know, I did my job was to do surveys of like properties that PHA owned for potential

sale or rehabilitation. There was more than a couple times when, you know, you just show up to a site, right? And you'd see a brand new house right next to where your house should have been. But your house was a vacant lot. And it turned out that, you know, they had just accidentally knocked over a house. And because it was vacant, they didn't tell anyone. That was fairly common. Incredible. Yeah. Like if nobody's if nobody's looking, is it really a construction accident? Right. If a raw house falls down in North Billy and no one's around to see it. Is it a violation? If we don't laugh, we'll cry. Yeah. Right. Here's a picture for me on site. The day of the collapse. It was chaos and pandemonium. No one knew how bad it was

yet. They never knew. I mean, Salvation Army looks, it looks okay. Like the Waffle House bit, that's still standing. Yeah, the Waffle House bit was still there. But this was, you know, I walked over here on my lunch break. I was like, let's go, let's go see the chaos and pandemonium. And then it was like, oh, my God, this is a big situation here. It was pretty bad. You have the thing, I was like 20. So I was like, let me post this social media. Yeah. Yeah. Which back in the day was fucking your live journal or whatever. Exactly. It was actually my space. It was Facebook. God. One thing you'll notice is the chimney that was in dispute. That's still standing.

Well, I mean, that's one way of resolving your your demolition dispute. Oh, speaking of social media, stop requesting to follow me on Instagram. We seem to have an Instagram. Instagram. Yeah. You can follow me on Instagram. I think we have that's fine on Instagram. Shapiro type character down here. Yeah, that guy. Yeah. Right. Defined hairline. Yes. So yeah, that's the first time we did a well. Well, there's your problem about a disaster that one of your hosts was on the scene for. Yeah. That's that's your field. Your field,

citizen journalism. You didn't even know you're doing it. But this is true. 10 years later, you get a podcast out of it. Exactly. Like in this case here in Fishtown, they were demolishing one building with the excavator and they wound up taking down two buildings. It's got a little damage is fine, which is very common. It's still like a really common thing. No one no one's figured out how to demolish an attached building. And it's meant to. They weren't meant to do it. Yeah. You should just not demolish attached buildings, certainly not with an excavator tool only and tool only is like a big thing.

Right. And one of the things that like resulted from this disaster was that, you know, there's a lot more like specification of like these attached buildings. You only use hand tools, which as we can see here is being followed to the lesser. Exactly. The other thing that happened was that licenses and inspections became licenses plus expense inspections. Oh, Baz Luhrmann's licenses plus inspections. Yes, they rebranded. I think they hired a couple, they hired like a couple more officers, but that was it. And maybe did some reorganizational things, but there's there's a whole list of like recommendations based on a city, based on a city investigation after this that goes into like all the things that

went wrong. And it doesn't really seem like anything's all that different from kind of a day to day on the ground perspective. Oh, so it could happen again and worse. Yeah, probably. I mean, you know, one of the things we're really good at in America is commissioning studies for how to improve things, but like we don't actually do the things to improve those. It's equally important to ignore those studies in favor of our own opinions. This is true. Yeah. I mean, look at like, I don't know, the historic preservation task force or like the Washington Avenue surveys or like. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love it. It's great. You know, that particular parcel.

Well, the former site of the Salvation Army is now this memorial. The rest of it is the surface parking lot. The the truest memorial. Yeah. The the big nice parking garage with the terracotta facade that stayed for a little bit longer, but that did get demolished. That was that was a nice looking building. Yeah, there is theoretically going to be a building that will be built here, which appears to be based on the idea of taking a large building and stacking it on top of two smaller buildings. It looks like one of those like Minecraft animals. It's another one of those like Jenga block towers. I hate it. I don't like it either. But you know, pretty convenient to have this building collapse down the block from a fire

station, though, when you think about it. Well, he wanted to get the fire station, which he's not going to get now. No, although you can see in these massing diagrams, you're like, we'll eventually we're going to get the fire station and build this building. They're not getting the fire station. It's fine. Just build it over and incorporate the fire station. The fire station. Yeah, you know what? We'll take over the we'll take over the mutter museum, too. We'll take over the Trader Joe's. No more of what we have to stand in line while we shop because we live in a diseased place. No, the Trader Joe's will inexplicably get smaller in worse. I like the Trader Joe's. I just don't go there because I'd rather kill myself than

stand in that line. I don't understand how you can like it and yet want to kill yourself before going there. I'm a man of because I like the food. That's me in London. It's perfectly normal way to feel about a place. Humans are complex. Jackass. Yeah, that's right. That's right. We contain multitudes. Well, so for you, because really, you're better than everyone. That just means more multitudes. Of fewer like contains like one multitude. Yeah, it's a multitude. You contain like six guys. You just contain two. Yeah. Yeah. Just a single dude. Dude's rock.

Safety third. No, we have to do the reflection. To do the reflection. Yeah. Damn it. What did we learn? What did we learn? Probably nothing. Same shit as always. Hand tools only. That goes for the porno theater and for the demolition site. Good point. Yeah, you should not bring should not bring any sort of assistive device in with you on the porno theater. That's right. That's right. Stop bringing your your automated dildos. Yeah, stop. The circuits are at capacity. No, Hitachi ones. They should have like one of those like metal switches for Hitachi ones. Actually, if you throw like a like a TSA body scanner, but like in sort of a non-judgmental way. Get to the reflection. Yeah.

We have a science based system on this podcast for fucking SMARM cultural insensitivity, unprovoked violence, misogyny. It's a very high SMARM disaster on account of the developer. I would give I would give I would give like SMARM. I don't know this guy had that much. I mean, I guess he had SMARM in the sense that like he died instead of facing punishment. It's actually, yeah, I give him a seven on the SMARM. Pretty, pretty culturally insensitive around definitely a lot of unprovoked violence. Unprovoked violence is probably a seven culturally insensitive. I'm not sure. I think he was

he was just trying to promote he was trying to I mean he was trying to promote Philadelphia's gay community, right? But he was also like doing it for cynical reasons. So I'm not, you know, so he could. So basically sort of morally equivalent to the Raytheon Pride Float. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense, right? So yeah, cultural insensitivity, I would go give me a four on that. Maybe a three. Four. What was the next one? All right, safety third. Safety third. Hello, Liam, Roz and Alice. Hi. And to the possible guest. Fuck you. I don't know. Oh, my story comes from vocational school in Finland. Famous Finnish politeness boy, where I was finishing off my carpentry artisan studies.

After the school, I started and had to close down for lack of students. And this one was closest to it. In woodworking spaces, there are large vacuums built into the building. They suck the wood dust away from machines and dump it into a large bin contained in its own large closet. Again, need that in the porno theater. Yes. The load sucker machine. That's right. You have a large central centralized vacuum system. It sucks everyone off. It's sanitary. What are you complaining about? Oh, yeah, we sent it straight to the sperm bank, actually. It's fine. It just got just hooked up to a big truck. It's fine. Yeah, big, big, like, big, like, you know, like one of those septic system trucks. Yeah. Yeah,

I do. And it just says loads on the side. Yeah, you know, we ain't hauling water. Dick's socked pools filled, not same truck. The vacuum has an emergency shutdown that when it detects smoke in the pipe, it shuts down immediately and shuts up the power and machinery haul. So all the machines stop as well. The first thing you learn when you start at carpentry vocational school is how the emergency fire shutdown works and what to do when it's activated. And of course, the places for fire extinguishers and how to handle them, right? Okay.

Small fires or just smoking dust, especially in the older machines, happened once or twice a year. Once or twice a year and usually put them. Emotionally overcome there. Yes, exactly. So to speak. He was overcome by small fires or smoking dust. Yes. Small fires or just smoking dust, especially in the older machines, happened once or twice a year and usually put themselves out. And the vacuum shutdown was really effective. So no accidents happened. Until great. That's that finish engine. Oh, until one Tuesday.

Oh boy. That finish engineering is just sort of like sitting there stoically while the entire system explodes. Yeah, the finish fire alarm. You break the glass in case of a fire and there's just a knife in there. It doesn't help with the fire, but now you have a knife. It's a knife and a shot of vodka. And a cigarette. Yeah. You're still going to die, but you're a lot more relaxed about it. Now, I myself was not in school that day. I was sleeping off of my hangover

for drinking myself in my underwear after a long week of school. Are we sure this person is finished? That's a Scandinavian thing. Yeah, drinking under pants is yeah. Yeah, that's big. Yeah, I was, I was joking. I was, I was like, yeah, this is a sort of like, this is up there. Oh, I want to get drunk. Yeah. You can get drunk now. No, I have to go downstairs. One of the first year students whose identity we never learned

was cutting a larger piece of wood with an older, fairly large table saw with a sliding table. It's in here. Yeah, this might be maybe an eight dollar 16 foot joist. Now, this is almost identical to the one in the picture I added. They accidentally slightly bended the piece of wood during cutting. So it started to heat up the saw and the wood dust under the table, hot fire. This resulted in the building's vacuum to shut itself down

and kill killed the power to the whole machinery hall, which was what it was supposed to do. So student freaked out after seeing the smoke rising under the table and thought to themselves, I don't want to burn down the classroom. I need to get this fire away from here. I'll just put it over there with the other fire. Other fire. Yes. So they did the most logical thing.

They reactivated the power to the hall from the power panel and then a vacuum from a different panel labeled Emergency Fire Shutdown. The vacuum then sucked the embers safely away from the classroom. Two seconds later, safely, safely into the big bin full of wood shavings. Yes. Two seconds later, the bin where the vacuum dumps the wood dust exploded, creating a blast wave, throwing the closet doors and the large doors leading outside and the ones leading the machinery hall almost off their hinges.

Luckily, the bin was not even a half full at that time and no one was anywhere near the explosion, so nobody got hurt. Improbable. Improbable, yes. No, it's Finland. Like somehow no one is injured despite a horrible thing. Massive disaster. Finland is not PVP enabled.

It's fine. It's basically true. That's how they won the Winter War, except for the one sniper they had. The next day, I came to school. There weren't even burn marks and the sawdust was cleaned away, but the vacuum was busted and we had to use two much smaller portable vacuums between 20 students and five different machines that required them. Luckily, half of your working space nearly exploding was good enough

a reason to get extra time for my thesis piece, and I finished it a year and a half late of that mark at another vocational school after the one in this story got demolished for unrelated reasons. You got to take that gentleman's term. I don't respect you. If you graduated on time, fuck you. So thank you for making my workdays much more interesting, and Finland mentioned. That's true.

Meet at the Market Square. I don't know which one, but if we come to Finland, we can go shooting. We can shoot bottles and cans off a fence. Yeah, we can collect. I understand you do that there. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I'd like to go to Finland and shoot some guns. Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah, we could eat some reindeer. Yeah, I'll come to make their life a living hell. Thanks, dude. Yeah, just in retribution. Yes. Our next episode is on the Boston molasses disaster. Do we have any commercials before we go? Oh, my God.

Co-dose bond, trash feature, 10,000 losses. Yes. Find us live by donkeys. Do people want more June? Where can they find more June? Oh, you still have to mail me money at 844 North Broad Street. That's it. No, actually, no lesser bombs.

Yeah, we may have a show coming up. Yeah, Justin and I are working on the building show. Yeah, I thought we met the live show. No, no, this is the building show. Oh, yeah. We're still trying to find the one AV person in the United States who knows what a bit rate is so I can be at the live show and not sound fucked up.

Yeah, we've got good internet at the space. We could just force you to come over here. I don't think you have that power. Okay. Do you have a passport yet? Yeah, no, I have the passport. Well, I also have a shitload of anxiety about flying. Alice, I was thinking about this.

No, I was thinking about this. We should, you should find somebody to, you know, like put you into a suitcase or something. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. I feel like that might work. I think about this too. Yeah.

Yeah, for show. Just the fun. Yeah. So the building show, theoretically, will be what is two Saturdays from now? Oh, I don't know. I don't know either. Oh, July 1st, dummy. Is that July 1st?

That's July 1st. No, that's July 2nd. Fuck. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Saturday, July 2nd, Justin and I are going to grill some food and have a call-in show where we take your calls about buildings. Yes, we're going to talk about buildings.

We'll have some, we'll have some ringers maybe. Yeah, for sure. Here's some interesting people. We, we're going to, we're going to do a dry run this weekend, but we're not going to tell you about that. Yeah. But hopefully the building show will work. We have no idea how we're going to do it,

but we're going to give it a shot. It's going to work better than a normal building. So, yeah. Can I remember? Remember, always paint your bricks. No, don't do that. No, absolutely not. Always paint your brick.

It's hot. This podcast is canceled. Good night.