A Memorial for the Living

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Bushkin. In the space of a week, back before the world came to a halt, I took two trips. One was to downtown Manhattan to the nine eleven Memorial. I'm ashamed to say I'd never visited before, even though I live in Manhattan, one Express subway stop away. I'd seen pictures, I'd walked right by it, but for some reason, I'd never gone right up to it. So I did. Finally saw the two big holes in the ground marking the spot where the Twin Towers once stood, saw the waterfalls, the black stone, the somber lines of trees surrounding the memorial. It was pouring rain. There was no one else there. My second trip was to Jacksonville, Florida, two unseasonably cold winter days. I wanted to see a chart. I know that might seem odd who goes to Florida to see a chart? But there I sat in the conference room of what looked like an old bank right by the freeway, and someone hooked a laptop up to a big screen and showed me a scatterplot X axis, Y axis, a bunch of dots, each in the shape of a human figure. At the time, I didn't think of my visit to Florida and my visit to the nine eleven Memorial as connected. They were just two random quests that seemed like they might lead somewhere. That's what I do at the beginning of every year when I start the research for a new season of the show. I spend a lot of time pursuing random ideas. But then March came and the world turned very strange and very dark, and I sat in my room and realized that those two trips were about the same thing. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the final episode of a season that has been preoccupied with understanding our attachments to objects, to rituals, to traditions, to elaborate bits of machinery like airplanes. This episode is about our attachment to our memories, the things we choose to remember as a society, and the things we choose to forget. In September of two thousand and one, when two hijacked passenger jets crashed into the World Trade Towers in New York City, a young architect named Michael Arod was living in downtown Manhattan.

00:03:08
Speaker 2: And a couple of nights after the attack, I was on my bicycle and I made my way to Washington Square Park and at two or three in the morning, there were a dozen or so people standing around that fountain in the middle of the park, and there was no ceremony, there was no speech. There was just people standing there together, not even you know, in ones and twos and threes. And when I walked up to the edge of that fountain and stood next to a stranger, I felt, for the first time in two three days since something shift that I was supported by these people, and in turn, just by standing next to them, I was supporting them. And I think that sense of belonging for the first time pushed me some way to on to participate in this idea for a memorial.

00:04:04
Speaker 1: A memorial. The vision that came to a Rod was of two two giant, empty concrete vessels in the Hudson River, a few blocks from the twin towers, each roughly the size and shape of the footprint of the towers.

00:04:18
Speaker 2: Themselves, imagining the surface of the Hudson River somehow shorn open, forming these two square voids in the water, cascading into these voids and never filling them up, and so they remained these empty, inexplicable vessels.

00:04:33
Speaker 1: A few years later, the city set up a competition to design a memorial for the site. It was the largest design competition in history, over five thousand entries from sixty three countries, including some of the most famous architects in the world. Michael Arod was a nobody. He worked for New York's Housing Authority designing police stations. He took his original idea and moved it from the Hudson River to the actual site of the fallen towers. Two deep voids representing the footprint of the twin towers, each with a waterfall and reflect pool, ringed by the names of those who died. He entered, and he won.

00:05:15
Speaker 2: The towers were about two hundred and twelve feet across, and the reflecting pools that you see on the site today are one hundred and seventy six feet across from waterfall to waterfall. That waterfall is ringed by eight foot wide water table that brings that out further to one hundred and ninety six if I'm not mistaken, and then surrounding that water table where the names are displayed is an area where you can walk around the pools, and that area is ringed by trees, and so that first row of trees that surround each pool is precisely two hundred and twelve feet across.

00:05:50
Speaker 1: He called his design Reflecting Absence, a precise representation of what was taken away on the morning of nine to eleven.

00:05:59
Speaker 2: What I wanted to do is convey to people who come here, very clearly without embellishment, how large these towers were. And that's very evident when you stand at the edge of that pool, and there is something that no photograph can capture until you're there. At the sense of the scale of the you as a person next to this enormous space is you have to experience it there and to see the thousands of names that surround these two pools. To convey the loss of so many lives.

00:06:35
Speaker 1: A rod conceived of something simple and beautiful. The task of making it real fell to the Port Authority. The Port Authority builds and runs much of the transportation infrastructure in the New York region, the bridges, tunnels, airports. They're like the metro areas in house engineer, contractor, and handyman all in one. If your handyman had an annual budget in the billions. They actually built the original World Trade Center, and the responsibility for building the memorial was theirs.

00:07:07
Speaker 3: Nice to see you on time today. Yeah, so we were just so.

00:07:13
Speaker 1: I asked the two former Port Authority executives who oversaw the memorial project, Chris Ward and David Tweety, to meet me at ground zero. I wanted to understand what it means to make memory real in the way that Arod was proposing.

00:07:28
Speaker 4: What a complexity of just building it, then the complexity of the symbolism and the culture of why did people choose to put so much into the site, which then exacerbated or made instructibility.

00:07:40
Speaker 1: You can walk around a bit, sure, why don't we start by really simple? I'm happy the nine to eleven Memorial wasn't an ordinary project. The design committee made it clear that they wanted something built on the site of the old towers, which created a logistical nightmare because ground zero isn't some vacant lot, It's one of the most dense urban spaces in the country. I met the Port Authority guys in the lobby of four World Trade Center, which is seventy two stories high, but it is also a one World Trade Center at one hundred and four stories and a two or three, a planned five and a seven World Trade Center, plus the nine eleven Museum, a performing arts center, and a massive transit hub where the Path commuter trains enter from New Jersey. The hub looks like the bones of a beached whale or a giant hair clip, depending on your perspective. That structure also contains a mall, and underneath it all, running right through the middle, is a subway line, the Number one train. All of these structures had to be built at the same time as Michael Arod's memorial Voids, and because everything is basically on top of everything else, the logistics of planning and building were overwhelming.

00:08:57
Speaker 5: So you have memorialization, you have a museum, you have real estate, you've got a security center, you've got an ecumenical religious city. You pour all that in and then you've got the overlag of the families were wondering, you know, where's my commemoration?

00:09:12
Speaker 3: Where will I warn? You put that all in?

00:09:15
Speaker 5: And it's impossible to disentangle a stet of priorities.

00:09:19
Speaker 1: Tweetywood and I stood by the two black Stone voids in the pouring rain, and they tried to explain what they went through.

00:09:27
Speaker 5: So we use the analogy that the construction was so difficult because it was like the children's game of pickup sticks that if you if you know that little game where you've got the multi colored sticks and if you pick one up, the other one moves and then you lose.

00:09:41
Speaker 3: Everything here is connected.

00:09:43
Speaker 1: The political leadership in New York made it clear that the memorial had to be finished in time for the tenth anniversary of the attacks September eleventh, twenty eleventh.

00:09:53
Speaker 3: Just to be tangible about it.

00:09:54
Speaker 6: The memorial plaza, which we were on a huge pressure to get done by the tenth anniversary, is sitting on the ceiling of the hub.

00:10:02
Speaker 1: The hub the place where all the underground transit lines converge.

00:10:06
Speaker 6: We have to completely refashion the construction process of how that hub got built. That huge costs by the way, in order to get this done first, so they built top down rather than the normal traditional.

00:10:19
Speaker 1: The normal traditional way is to build from the bottom up, start with the foundation, go from there, and Tweety says the Port Authority originally had a plan to do things that way.

00:10:30
Speaker 5: The problem was when you did that schedule, the memorial plaza wouldn't have been done until the end of twenty thirteen. And so that's when we were starting to go, wait a minute, the city is not going to tolerate the port authority telling them me, telling them, you're gonna have to wait till twenty thirteen before you can commemorate the anniversary.

00:10:50
Speaker 3: And dates matter. I mean, ten.

00:10:52
Speaker 5: Years is different than thirteen years, which is different than twelve years. And you know, the engineers, a couple of them came up with the idea build the ceiling first, basically, go across the entire site with the ceiling, which is the ceiling of what's.

00:11:08
Speaker 3: Below, but most important, it's the floor.

00:11:10
Speaker 5: Of the plaza. And then once you've done that, build down from there.

00:11:16
Speaker 1: As if that wasn't enough, the governor of New York at the time insisted that the subway, the Number one line, keep running throughout all this. So they had to build a box around the subway tracks, suspend the box high above the site, and work around it. Which is one of those odd facts that you only think about if you live in New York and you took the Number one train, as I did many times. In those years, and you suddenly realized that on all of those trips you were in a real life version of Jenga, you know, the game where you have a stack of building blocks and you remove them one by one until everything crashes.

00:11:52
Speaker 5: So there was a whole re engineering of how you'd support the one train, how the path train would get protected.

00:12:00
Speaker 3: And remember you got an operating railroad.

00:12:02
Speaker 6: So you're building a temporary structure and housing the ceiling of a hub with train tracks below you, below the ones here, but the path trains were right under.

00:12:15
Speaker 3: The building up platforms exactly, That's exactly.

00:12:17
Speaker 1: And then you build a platform and then you plump the memorial on top of the platform, and even as things are going on there.

00:12:24
Speaker 3: And then you're feeding. And that's what I was getting up before.

00:12:26
Speaker 5: You're feeding the construction horizontally rather than vertically, which you know, added about sixty million dollars worth of additional cost to handle them. Like I was saying, at one point, you had people hand excavating underneath the one train because there just wasn't room to get any heavy equipment down there.

00:12:45
Speaker 1: If you could put the memorial in the Hudson River, you wouldn't have this problem. Of course, you just build some pilings into the riverbed, and if you didn't have to race and finish by September eleventh, twenty eleven, your life would be easier as well. You could start at the bottom and build up the normal way, not start at the top and build down. In the service of fulfilling the very strict requirements of memory, something that would have been straightforward was turned into something very complicated.

00:13:13
Speaker 5: Okay, So again, take something as simple as exactly where we're standing here. Yeah, here's the brass with all the names.

00:13:22
Speaker 1: We were standing by the perimeter of one of the voids. Ward was pointing at the rows of names of all those who died in the attacks. The names are embossed in brass and inlaid into the void's stone walls. It's meant to be something solid that people can touch. But if you're the port authority, you have to think through the implications of that.

00:13:41
Speaker 3: Due to the ability for brass to capture heat.

00:13:45
Speaker 5: And then if on a really really hot day someone could put their hand down on this, they could get literally a second degree burn if the sun had been on this all day.

00:13:53
Speaker 3: So there's a cooling system underneath.

00:13:56
Speaker 5: This brass so that it will always stay safe, so people can end up touching it. At the same time, if a little kid in the middle of winter when it's freezing, came out here and wanted to stickness tongue on it, you know, the famous get stuck to the flagpole in the playground.

00:14:11
Speaker 3: So there's a heating system underneath here as well.

00:14:14
Speaker 5: So just to end up showing these names, you've got a system which is both heating and cooling a copper you know facade here for where the names are atched.

00:14:24
Speaker 1: Well, if you just did concrete, would you have.

00:14:28
Speaker 5: There are a lot of different ways you could have put names, you know out there, but this was and there they're all backlit as you can see.

00:14:35
Speaker 3: So in some respects, would there.

00:14:37
Speaker 6: Be a more efficient way to have names r absolutely, but this is a special site.

00:14:48
Speaker 1: In the end, the price tag for the National September eleventh Memorial and Museum came to somewhere around seven hundred million dollars. To put that in perspective, the cost of the Vietnam Memorial in today's dollars was twenty million. The cost of the Lincoln Memorial in today's dollars was forty five million. Now, is seven hundred million dollars too much? I don't know. It depends on what you're comparing it to. I suppose the point is that we could have done it for less, but we chose not to because we wanted to memorialize that event as perfectly and precisely as possible, down to its dimensions, location, and date of completion. When we want to we take our memories very seriously. The maintenance schedule on that kind of thing must be intense. I mean, you're right, you can't fail, right, it's exactly.

00:15:48
Speaker 3: On the ice in the winter issue, right, It's just every part of that. Global warming makes it easier.

00:15:54
Speaker 5: So one of the problems is if you'll see the way the water flows underneath the perimeter, it's horizontal to the ground. Here about the side, you get a heavy wind in the wintertime and it whips across the top. It picks up moisture and then blows it onto this brick, which then potentially creates ice.

00:16:13
Speaker 1: Conditions between keeping the fountains going and security and the heating and cooling systems and the museum staff and chipping the ice off the brick, the operating budget for the memorial comes to another eighty million dollars a year. So all told, we're somewhere over one point five billion dollars for the memorial so far. The nine to eleven Memorial is option number one for memory management. The alternative option number two is Jacksonville.

00:17:02
Speaker 7: Do you have your high school Clumbar Jr.

00:17:05
Speaker 3: High School, Dicloma AMA veneer's degree from the University of Connective. Wow, what'd you major in?

00:17:11
Speaker 1: Okay?

00:17:13
Speaker 8: Did you ever go to jailer Quicksand?

00:17:16
Speaker 1: I went to Jacksonville, Florida during the count. Every homeless organization in the country does this during the last ten days of January. Volunteers go out and count the number of people living on the streets. The group I went to see Changing Homelessness had one hundred and eighty volunteers, divided up into shifts morning, afternoon, and evening gathering information.

00:17:40
Speaker 9: What are you working at?

00:17:41
Speaker 3: I work, do someone and do what I already actually do?

00:17:47
Speaker 6: Wherever were Yeah?

00:17:49
Speaker 1: So when you became homeless?

00:17:51
Speaker 3: Did you become homeless?

00:17:52
Speaker 9: Did you like run away from a family?

00:17:55
Speaker 3: Was there violence at home? Any kind of differences?

00:17:58
Speaker 1: Jobs?

00:17:59
Speaker 3: Did you start?

00:18:00
Speaker 7: Okay?

00:18:02
Speaker 1: Jacksonville did its first count more than fifteen years ago more as an academic exercise than anything else.

00:18:09
Speaker 7: I honestly thought, we knew, why do we need to do a registry?

00:18:12
Speaker 3: Right?

00:18:13
Speaker 7: We know everybody?

00:18:14
Speaker 1: That's Don Gilman, who runs Changing Homelessness. The more they thought about this idea of a registry, the more they wondered if they were missing people. What if there were homeless people out there who never stayed in a shelter or who never showed up looking for services. So Gilman decided to do a real count.

00:18:31
Speaker 7: So that was the first time we went out when it was convenient for our clients and not convenient for us. We went out between four and six am on a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

00:18:42
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:18:43
Speaker 1: The idea being, if you're on the streets in the early morning, you really are homeless.

00:18:47
Speaker 7: You are homeless, that's where you spent the night.

00:18:55
Speaker 1: So now for the count. The volunteers gathered before sunrise College students, formerly homeless, people who remember what it was like on the streets, teachers helping out before their day starts. Nurses from the nearby hospitals. I carry with them hygiene kits, toothpastes, socks, soap, shampoo. They fan out across Jacksonville looking under bridges, in park cars, in abandoned buildings. If you're sleeping, they leave you alone. If you're awake, they ask you questions. What they learn gets fed into something called the by name list, and the data from that list is graft as a scatterplot. That was the chart I went down to Jacksonville to see. Each homeless person they found is represented by an icon on the chart. The vertical axis is a measure of vulnerability. Do they have disabilities or mental illness? Can they take care of themselves? The horizontal axis measures how long they've been without housing. If your name appears down in the left hand corner, that means you're pretty healthy and haven't been on the streets that long. If you're in the upper right hand corner vulnerable and homeless for an extended period of time, that's a different story.

00:20:07
Speaker 7: Looking at that scatter plan, it's not dots, it's little people. So it's always bringing it back to even though we're looking at aggregate data, we're always bringing it back to that individual who's experiencing homelessness, so we know their name, we know who they are.

00:20:25
Speaker 1: The fundamental condition of homelessness is invisibility. Those on the streets are the easiest to ignore and the easiest to forget. The scatter plot reminds us who they are, what their lives are like, what their needs are. I pointed to someone way over on the right hand side, the side where the most vulnerable people are clustered. Don Gilman's colleague, Charles Temple, recognizes the name right away.

00:20:50
Speaker 8: He's talked about every meeting that we have now that guy, that.

00:20:55
Speaker 7: Guy, because he's our guy. We get him house like our whole.

00:20:58
Speaker 8: That drops our whole after time.

00:21:00
Speaker 7: Some of these clients, even if they're not up on the vulnerability index, they can be difficult people to work with.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: Some people need all kinds of help. Others really only need one thing. Housing But which.

00:21:15
Speaker 7: Which ones are? Clay County guy that's been out there for a long time.

00:21:18
Speaker 8: He's been on the list for over a year, and like you're saying, there's just nothing out there for him. But we bring him up every week, We talk about him every week, and actually just last week we may have identified a housing resource hud Vash might take him, make a waiver and actually accept him through.

00:21:36
Speaker 1: Every Tuesday at one o'clock in the same room where I'm sitting all the key housing advocates in Jacksonville gather and comb through this list, all the names one by one.

00:21:46
Speaker 7: What's happening? I mean, what is the barrier? Is it because they want to stay in a particular part of our community and there's not a whole lot of affordable housing there? Is it because they have a very recent eviction? Is it because they have a very recent or a violent felony at some point? And how do we who are our landlords that will maybe work with this person?

00:22:08
Speaker 1: The names on the jack list are arranged deliberately. Where they fall on the scatterplot gives each name meaning. And I was struck as I sat in that conference room by how similar that was to the names list at the nine to eleven memorial. The victims there suffer from the same condition of invisibility, and the list of the names around the top of the voids is supposed to give them permanence. Why not do it alphabetically like other memorials do?

00:22:42
Speaker 9: I think the biggest reason, at least in my mind, is you lose so much of the story of these people by doing that.

00:22:54
Speaker 1: The job of figuring out which name went where on the parapet fell to another architect on Michael Arod's team, Amanda Sachs.

00:23:02
Speaker 9: I think it's important to know if they were on a plane, if they were in the North Tower or South Tower, if they were a first responder. I think it adds a level of meaning. It brings meaning to their name as much as possible. I also think, you know, one of the other reasons, just a very basic reason, was there are there are a few people with very similar names. There are people with names that only the middle name is different. When you list these people alphabetically, I think it loses you lose the sense of people as individuals.

00:23:46
Speaker 1: The guiding principle of Sex's work was something Michael Arod called meaningful adjacency.

00:23:52
Speaker 9: What it means is that every person is placed along the parapet in a adjacency with one or two or sometimes three people also obviously other victims that they were in some way close with.

00:24:14
Speaker 1: Two nine hundred and eighty two people died that day. Their names are first grouped according to the floor of the tower they worked on, or the plane they were on, or if they were emergency rescue the latter company they belonged to. Then within those groups, each name of the dead was placed nearest to the people who meant the most of them. Sachs had to work out each of those relationships and determine the patterns behind all those long columns of names.

00:24:42
Speaker 9: I would say I spent two years to three years on this arrangement just trying to understand the relationships, trying to do these kind of tests and see how it would work.

00:24:57
Speaker 1: And were there any adjacencies that were particularly meaningful.

00:25:04
Speaker 9: I have to say, I think for me, the whole I mean, every every person on that memorial was I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional. I can't say that any any adjacency had any more important than than any other. I mean, some stories are, you know, you think the kind of crazy, like, for example, that there were two women on Fight one seventy five and there was another woman on Fight eleven, and I can't remember exactly what their relationship was, but I think one of them was the godparents of the other. And you know, Flight eleven went into the North tower and Flight on seventy five was went into the South tower, and the fact that there were people that knew each other on those planes is insane.

00:26:11
Speaker 1: Sax wanted to find a way to put the names of those two people as close together as possible, maybe at the point at which the group of names who died in the North tower touched the group of names from the South tower.

00:26:23
Speaker 9: We actually wanted them to be ad as adjacent as possible, So we wanted the one in the North pool to be on the lower right hand corner, and the South pool would anyway be towards the upper the north west corner.

00:26:40
Speaker 1: She tried a hundred different ways to plant it out, couldn't make it work.

00:26:45
Speaker 9: So, yeah, that's kind of sad. The one adjacency that we didn't get is the one that I'm that I'm remembering. Yeah, but I just, you know, as I said before, just every name, every person has so much importance. I can't really say otherwise.

00:27:11
Speaker 1: We have a memorial for the dead at ground Zero, arranged according to their relationships, and we have a memorial for the living in Jacksonville, a scatterplot of the homeless, arranged according to their needs. Two memorials with the same intent, because when we add context to names, names become real. But of course, once you start reflecting on the similarities between Ground Zero and Jacksonville, then inevitably you start thinking about the differences.

00:27:56
Speaker 2: Initially, I was actually drawn to eastern white pine trees. They're very tall, towering, and there was just some an evergreen and read somewhere description of them describe a sort of the towering giants of the forest.

00:28:12
Speaker 1: Michael Arod was told his original design for the nine to eleven Memorial was too bleak, two voids on an empty windswept plaza, so he decided to add trees.

00:28:24
Speaker 2: And I thought there was something beautiful about the idea of actually them directing your gaze upward toward the sky while you were there, and developed a design that had about seventy or eighty of them on the plaza, but that you know, didn't feel quite right enough.

00:28:42
Speaker 1: A Rod deliberated with his partner in the memorial's design, the landscape architect Peter Walker. They settled on swamp white oaks, a gorgeous tree, peeling bark, lustrous, lobed, two toned leaves, green with a silvery underside. But then, of course it was left to the port Authority, to David Tweety and Chris Ward to figure out how to plant a forest suspended atop a transit hub.

00:29:10
Speaker 3: So then adding all of these trees of these trees.

00:29:14
Speaker 5: Yeah, delayed for at least a year figuring out the engineering to put all these tree pots. It's hard to put all these trees in when it's not a dirt necessary and the moisture that goes into the.

00:29:26
Speaker 3: Dirt, and the weight because there's.

00:29:28
Speaker 6: A void underneath ten dollars of a different structure, of additional structural support on the hub buildings under.

00:29:34
Speaker 1: Forty million just to support the weight of the trees. And how many trees are.

00:29:38
Speaker 3: There, We're going to say three and sixty and sixty to each each tree. So here's a tree here? What what? What? What's between the box and there's literally man made.

00:29:52
Speaker 5: Dirt which is super light compared to nature made dirt with a material in it which allows it to capture moisture to be very efficient for maintaining the health of the trees.

00:30:02
Speaker 3: But each box has.

00:30:04
Speaker 5: Its own moisture reader inside of it, so they can tell you know when it's you know, the tree is threatened. So you've got in each little part of it. You've got this amount of technology to put anywhere else. You go, oh my god, this is These are just trees.

00:30:19
Speaker 1: But not just trees, perfect trees, peeling bark, lustrous slope, two toned leaves, trees that are fed and cared for, and each given their own place to live.

00:30:30
Speaker 3: How big is the box? Ooh? Probably out to like fear so like ten by ten, ten by twelve.

00:30:39
Speaker 5: And the problem was when you began to move them over areas where it was there was less infrastructure underneath it, it got even more expensive to build the box and then bring this infrastructure to support the.

00:30:52
Speaker 1: Box trees with an expensive, bespoke, carefully engineered social support system.

00:30:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, but again that was driven from good will you turn that off?

00:31:05
Speaker 1: As suddenly a security guard came running up. Apparently we needed authorization to conduct our interview. The attention to detail at the nine to eleven Memorial extends even to when and how you are allowed to engage in recorded conversation.

00:31:22
Speaker 3: These are the guys who built this whole thing. I was the executive director of the port authority. They ran, if we just talk to a police officer real quick?

00:31:32
Speaker 7: Yes, But unfortunately the media department does not work and they but yeah.

00:31:40
Speaker 1: We ended up leaving the memorial plaza for the sidewalk fifty yards away. We stood in the rain and looked back at the exacting beauty of this act of collective memory. The nine eleven memorial is perfect, but the Jacksonville Memorial is not. It's messy, a work in progress. Names get taking off the list when people find apartments or move away, and new people get added to the list all the time. Do the exits stay ahead of the entries.

00:32:20
Speaker 8: We do measure our inflow outflow on a regular basis, and we want to see our inflow less than our outflow. But we are teetering pretty much on the same amount that we are exiting. We're the ones we are housing. It's the same amount that we are seeing. So it's pretty close. But I think there's still a gap in there.

00:32:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're not over time. The rumber is not.

00:32:48
Speaker 7: It is shrinking, but it is painfully slow.

00:32:53
Speaker 1: There's no mystery why it's painfully slow.

00:32:56
Speaker 7: We would love to master lease one hundred one bedroom units that are at a price point that our rapid rehousing clients could reasonably maintain, and we just can't find them. There were a number of years, well where I've been here, I think while you were been doing this too, where we could find those they existed. They were out there, like many other places some of those older units. They're quirky and interesting. They're starting to get rehammed. The rents will go up, and then the people that used to be able to afford them cannot anymore.

00:33:34
Speaker 1: Gilman said that right now she can find the money to put her clients in apartments that run for up to six hundred and fifty dollars a month, but there just aren't any apartments in that range in Jacksonville. If she could find the money for an eight hundred dollars a month apartment, it would make things far easier. But where are you going to find an extra one hundred and fifty dollars a month? Who has that kind of money lying around?

00:33:59
Speaker 7: We are hitting the wall. We really now as a community have to pay attention to this. If our goal is to have fewer people out on the street instead of more, we got to start figuring out how do we build more deeply affordable housing faster.

00:34:18
Speaker 1: Some portion of the people who do not get help end up dying on the streets. Almost every community in the country has a service for those who've fallen. It happens in late December on Winter Solstice. It's become a tradition in Jacksonville. The service is held at the City Rescue Mission downtown. A choir sings, a local pastor gives the homily, then don Gilman performs her final duty of the year.

00:34:48
Speaker 7: I've had the honor for the last ten years of reading the names, and the list is always too long. And before I read the name, I remind everybody that there are six categories of homeless people, and that someone's mother or someone's father, someone's son, or someone's daughter, or their sister or their brother.

00:35:09
Speaker 3: It's more than.

00:35:13
Speaker 7: Dots on a scattered plot.

00:35:17
Speaker 1: How many people were on the list last in December?

00:35:19
Speaker 7: This December thirty thirty six, thirty six.

00:35:28
Speaker 1: The optimist in me always thought that the ultimate purpose of memorials was that they were dress rehearsals for our collective memory, that in the course of building a shrine to the fallen, we reminded ourselves of our broader obligations to the vulnerable. You give the benefit of your empathy and generosity to the memory of someone who was on a plane hijacked by terrorists, or to the memory of someone who worked in a toppled tower, and then it becomes easier to extend that empathy and generosity to the lonely and the suffering who are still among us. You get good at meaningful adjacency for the dead, and that makes you better at practicing it on the living. But that's not what happens, is it. We go to any length, any length, to commemorate one person's death, deploy armies of architects and engineers, then, in the same breath, look the other way as we step over someone lying on the street. A gorgeous mausoleum for the dead, A scatterplot for the living.

00:36:42
Speaker 3: Crystal Ponzer, age thirty two. Sam Sadowski, aged twenty five.

00:36:51
Speaker 1: I went home from Jacksonville and spent an afternoon watching Winter Solstice services on YouTube. Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Spokane, San Francisco. Small groups of people huddled together in the cold of a December night, holding candles, singing hymns.

00:37:17
Speaker 3: Margaret, Josephine Thompson, Jacko Hudson, Margarita.

00:37:24
Speaker 1: Then he's reading the names of the dead, hundreds of them.

00:37:28
Speaker 8: George Randall Solivar, aged twenty three, Edward Wound age forty.

00:37:37
Speaker 3: Seven, unknown, unknown unknown.

00:37:47
Speaker 1: I watched until I couldn't anymore. Then I wept. Revisionist history is produced by Meela Bell and Leeman Gestou with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton and on A naim Our. Editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Flon Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew Heather Feine, Carl Migliori, Maya Kaynig, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell and of course Jacob Weisberg, and from everyone here at Pushkin, thank you for listening to another season of revisionist history. You other reason we have the privilege of revising history every year. I'm Malcolm glampadettor