In the Shadow of the City

OK, this happens to be Chicago, but every city has a place like this, that weird, desolate area at the far end of town. We're a half mile west of the old abandoned steel mills. We're a half mile north of landfills where methane fires used to burn, just south of the auto junkyard, just east of the site of the old city dump, where there was a mountain of raw garbage that would stink up the neighborhood whenever the wind would blow in the wrong direction. Everybody down here called it Mount Pacini, for the Alderman who let the city put it here. You'll notice all these, what would you call it, tire marks. This street is used for drag racing year round. Really? Yeah, because it's basically far enough away from the police that they don't don't do anything about it. My guide is Charlie Gregerson, who grew up down here. He shows me where a lake, like Calumet, used to be back in the 40s when he was a kid. He'd go fishing on a rowboat with his dad. Then the city started filling in huge sections of the lake with garbage and incinerator ash. He'd come here in the 70s and see bulldozers pushing around the rubble of some of Chicago's great buildings, which had been recently demolished. Louis Sullivan masterpieces like the Stock Exchange building and the Garrick Theater. This is where they ended up. Now, show me, we're standing here, where were all the buildings being dumped and what did that look like? Right here, right here at what was the north end of the dump. And actually, we picked, I picked up a few pieces of the Stock Exchange ornament right out of out of the lake. But of course, most of it had been ground right into the dirt because they had bulldozers that would just keep on, they would dump the stuff in piles and the bulldozers would just flatten it all out. And so there'd be this like Louis Sullivan, you know, terracotta ornament just sticking out of the... Just laying out there, yeah. And so, and so walking around when there's these, you know, pieces of buildings sticking up, I mean, it just seems like it just must have been such a strange scene, like this apocalyptic, you know, death of a city. Yeah, well, there were, I remember, I remember seeing one of these big Phoenix columns that I knew had come out of the Garrick Theater. It was just sticking out of the ground. Two of those in the Garrick Theater distributed the weight of the upper floors that were over the stage. One of those was just sticking out about a 45 degree angle out of the ground. And at that point, the Garrick had been gone for almost 10 years. There were once big plans for this area, for canals and waterways, a harbor that never really worked out. There's zoning maps of the city that show streets and complete neighborhoods, a whole grid of them that nobody ever got around to building. Instead, now, on top of all the trash, stands a golf course. Charlie says that from the clubhouse, he gets exactly the same view that he used to get back when he and his dad took out the rowboat. It's the same spot. That's where the lake once was. You can see clear to downtown. So far away, you might as well be in another city. Well, today on our program, we have stories from several places like this, from the shadow of the city, that weird no man's land where it always feels like secret stuff is happening, you know, just out of sight. This American Life, today show is a rerun. Act one, Brooklyn Archipelago. Brett Martin has this story, which takes place on the outskirts of, well, perhaps you've already figured out which city. Listen, it happens. You go out for a night with your friends and you wind up drunk, in your underwear, soaking wet, covered with blood, and shipwrecked on a desert island, all within sight of the Empire State Building. These things happen, or at least they did happen to Alex Zharov. Alex is 17 years old. He moved to the U.S. from a small town in the Ukraine when he was nine. He's skinny and wears tie-dyed T-shirts, an unmanageable spray of frizzy blonde hair, and a valiant, if not altogether successful, starter mustache. And, well, he can probably introduce himself better than I can. Here's how he responds when I ask him to state his name for the record. My name is Alex Zharov, and I love to have very radical experiences in life. And I consider myself to be a psychedelic, artistically productive person. Here are a few other things about Alex. He lives with his cute older girlfriend and his exceptionally patient parents in a small apartment in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Instead of going to high school, he's enrolled in an Internet homeschooling program. He's at work on a science fiction novel and has logged several hundred in-flight hours as a student pilot. But most of Alex's time is spent as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter for his band, eBuffalo. When I went to see them play at a two-day Russian rock festival last fall, I learned several things. First, there are many, many ex-Soviet immigrants living in Brooklyn. Second, they all very earnestly want to rock. And third, Alex Zharov, whether he's writhing on his back on stage or reclining in the dressing room with a beer and a cigarette, is kind of a superstar. Before we get to our story, the other key person you'll need to meet is someone who entered Alex's life at a crucial moment years ago, when Alex first came to the States. Alex had an awkward adjustment. He fought in school and was kind of depressed. He was bored. Then one day, Alex was walking along the Brighton Beach boardwalk and saw a group of older guys collecting money for something called the Russian Punk Rock Club of America, older guys like 25 and 30 years old. Alex was 12. One of the musicians he met that day was Roman Godolov, who immediately took to the young Alex. Well, he had this blink in his eyes. It's sometimes you see extraordinary person and, you know, you kind of know this. You know, he wasn't appeared to us as 12 year old at that moment. At 12 years old, he was writing songs that I was writing at 18. And after this, you know, we've been together all the time. We called him Hryusha. You know, that's... What does that mean? Hryusha means little piglet. Little piglet. Under his new friend's tutelage, Alex began walking around in an old Bolshevik style hat and trench coat. And his friends gave him books, Dostoevsky, Tolkien, guides to Slavic paganism, the beats, and also Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. Alex was particularly fond of those. And our story today, our own seafaring tale, happens on a boat that Roman owns, a 25 foot white sailboat, which Alex likes to refer to as the yacht. One cool evening last May, Alex, Roman, and another friend named Alex, Alex Lubochansky, decided to take a nice little boat trip in Jamaica Bay, the body of water that wraps around the southern end of Brooklyn. Here's Alex. The three of us decided to just get like 10 gallons of gas. And my friend Roman, he got a bottle of rum and we got two cans of food. And we just decided to have a cool trip on the yacht. And I started saying, oh, our goal is the open ocean. Let's sail to Poland, I told them. Roman had a slightly less ambitious agenda. Plan was just to go to the bridge, under the Rockaway Bridge, then turn around and then come back. It should have taken about 40 minutes. Things started to go wrong almost immediately. Before they even left the marina, Roman, who'd been making headway through the bottle of rum, fell into the water and they had to haul him back in. He was clearly in no shape to drive. This is Alex. He got drunk, then he just was babbling something, laughing like he said, don't go there, don't go there. And he was constantly saying, don't hit the shallows. He was already like, he didn't control the situation by that time. As a responsible journalist, I should say for the record that Roman does have one objection to Alex's version of events. It wasn't rum, by the way. It was a cognac. I don't know why everybody puts rum. So it was a cognac. You sure? It was a Latrek. Yes, it was Latrek cognac. I don't know why, how come it's become rum? It's probably Alex told it was rum, but it was cognac. Not a little bit, it was a lot. We was out of commission. I was out of commission. Alex and Alex had had a few drinks themselves. But we were perfectly sober and everything. We might have had a few drinks, but we were perfectly sober. But neither of you knows how to drive a boat. No, no, but we got a hold of it. It wasn't that hard. So we knew how to drive it. So like, it didn't seem pretty hard. Turn on the motor, you turn the boat, it turns cool. Somehow they managed to get out of the marina, gun the engine and take off across the water toward the Marine Park Bridge in the distance. Once there, they decided to try to sail to Brighton Beach and headed toward a landmass. But they got confused and turned back to open water. They drank some rum or maybe cognac. One way or another, they drank a lot of it. At one point It was a galling situation, and it was made even more maddening because the city was right there. I was thinking, how in the hell did I get myself into this situation? I never believed that something like this could happen in New York City, you know, like in such a huge city that you could see skyscrapers like 10 miles away, and on the other side you can die looking at them, you know. And also, I got a little mad at the city of New York. Like, I could understand if they had just one payphone there or at least, I don't know, like a button to press to know that you're there, you know. By probably 6 o'clock in the evening, it was getting a little dark. All my excitement has fled away and I got very cold, so I was like shaking, you know, shivering and no help at all, so I'm like, wow, this is going to get really bad. Were you hungry at this point also? I was very hungry and I was very thirsty. And I found limes. I tried to open them up, but they tasted so nasty. I couldn't, I didn't even think about eating them. Like there was no source of food other than the ducks. Ah yes, the ducks. You'll want to hear about the ducks. If I wasn't gonna get rescued in the next hour or two, I had a plan to kill a bunch of ducks to get some warm blood to warm myself, you know, so to drink some blood and to cut them open and use them, like, to warm myself. I had this strange idea about, use them as slippers. I even had, after that, I even had this psychedelic idea of floating on the ducks, making a raft out of the ducks. Imagine a man with strings attached to the ducks floating on the water. So it's like this duck rider, you know. Totally normal for a Russian hiker to go and pick up a duck. Not just to kill it, but to eat it, like. I was still, I can't, I don't, like, you could just go over and pick up a duck? Like how did you catch the duck? Oh, you just go after it with a stick. I mean, you're a human being, you got more brains than a duck. You can catch it. But I wasn't really thinking about doing it. I wasn't, like, fantasizing about killing ducks or anything like that. I was just thinking that if it comes to that, I'll have to, I'll have to get some blood to drink, you know. I know it sounds very violent, but like, I was fighting for my life, you know. Like, people might laugh when they hear about being trapped on an island that's so close to civilization, and the sharks and the ducks. I knew it was a funny situation, but I really got the feeling of what is it like being on a desert island. I felt like Robinson Crusoe, you know. I knew what it was like to be by yourself, away from civilization, with no help, and you're facing this huge problem, and the only person that's near you is you and the ghost of your death close by, you know. So I could smell the, smell my, smell my death in the air. It turns out that the island where Alex was stranded is called Ruffle Bar, and it lies only a 20-minute boat ride away from the coast of Brooklyn. Far from being traumatized or ashamed of his exploits, Alex wanted nothing more than to go back out there. And from the vantage of my overpriced, undersized apartment, I wanted to see a place where you could be totally alone in the wilderness, smelling your own death in the air, while in at least theoretical commuting distance to midtown Manhattan. So we hired a boat to take us to Ruffle Bar. In truth, I wasn't as completely surprised as some might be to learn that such a place exists. I grew up near the islands of Jamaica Bay in a neighborhood called Canarsie. And when I was little, my friends and I would cut through the empty lots near my house to explore the mix of trash and nature on the shoreline. It was a place totally apart from the rest of my mostly urban childhood, a secret place that my friends who lived even 10 or 15 blocks away were unaware existed. But then, the smaller islands around New York have always occupied a weird place on the edge of the city, home to all sorts of enterprise that the citizenry either doesn't know about or prefers not to see. Sanitariums and prisons, potter's fields and grand failed schemes. Ruffle Bar itself had been the site of several of the latter. Since the Civil War, it has housed a ferry stop, a resort hotel, and even a short-lived doomed community of some 40 buildings. We stop in front of a concrete foundation. A building of some kind was here. Oh, look, this is a cool thing. This is one of the World War II things that's here. Like, you open them up and you can go inside. It's like a room in there. It might be something like a bunker or something. You see the rope here? And the rope is really old. Let me take a picture of this. There are no buildings left here. The island has returned to a deeply wild state. There's a wall of dense brush and a few trees around which sinister gulls are circling. We pass a flock of ducks who take one look at Alex and wisely move away. I'm really thinking about where the heck is the scooter because it seems like it should be like, as we turn in, there should be more shoreline here. Yep, that's exactly it. Oh, wow. This is the scooter I tried to take. Let me show you, maybe you'll see the glass and stuff. It's awesome. As we search for Alex's Buddhist medallion that he'd left in the excitement of the helicopter rescue, we walk across a plain of thick, dry grass matted down like a carpet. Underneath, you can hear shells crunching and mysterious things scurrying around. Still, reminders that we are, in fact, in a major metropolis, are always close at hand. For one thing, there's the garbage. Piles of plastic and driftwood, but also shoes, steering wheels, prescription bottles, deflated balloons, a washer-dryer, several refrigerators, and oddly, boats. Three perfectly intact ones complete with oars. I hesitate to point these out to Alex, though, to be fair, they're probably too heavy for him to have dragged to the water. And then there's this reminder of civilization. Hello? Yeah. He was always close enough to the city that simply having a cell phone would have had him tucked safely into bed within half an hour. Alex was finally rescued after seven hours, thanks to Roman and Glubachansky. Back on the boat, they were having a fine old time. A police helicopter was performing drills nearby, and apparently no slouches in the cliched castaway department themselves, they had figured out that they could signal it with a mirror. But why rush? We really enjoyed the time staying there. We were just sitting on the boat and, you know, smoking the last tobacco that we have left. And we make a deal that we're not going to eat each other if we're really going to get hungry. So basically, I was having fun, you know, just a little bit, no hustle, no nothing, you know, very quiet, nice weather. Oh, so you didn't, so you were actually holding off signaling the helicopters while you had a nice day? Yeah, of course. It was a nice day. Still, as it began to get dark and the cigarettes ran out, the friends thought it was probably time to get a move on. A helicopter soon arrived and airlifted them off the boat. It wasn't until they were safely ashore, wrapped in blankets and being fed complimentary cookies, that either of them happened to mention that there'd been a third passenger. When the helicopter came back for Alex, cold, exhaustion and dehydration had left him in a trance-like, almost wild state. And for him, this island will always be a place where, maybe, there'd be monsters. And I was actually, when I was here, I was wondering, if it's like a totally wild place, are there any animals here other than birds? I was maybe hoping to see some cool animal, like a badger or something. I don't know. I like badgers a lot, actually. Is that right? Yeah, it's one of my favorite animals. You know, I like badgers for the same reason, probably, I like the state of Utah, where I never was, you know? It's like, something that has some kind of, what's it called? Like a secret, or it's hiding, or it's like, they attract me in a way that they might be hiding something cool from me. And that's what, after many hours spent with Alex, I find myself liking about him the most. His insistence on finding mystery and adventure everywhere he looks. It's easy to laugh at that, to write it all off as adolescent stupidity. But what if it's more than that? What if it's also a kind of adolescent magic? Actually, I'm thinking that this needed to happen, you know? I think, like, if I was a boring person and I would just, like, stay at home all the time and be like a nerd, I would never get into this situation. So I think this happened strictly because I was with the right people at the right time, like, in the right situation, you know? Think about that. Every step of the way, by almost any measure, Alex could not have been more wrong. It takes a special kind of grace to turn that into right time, right place. And how can you help but envy that? Who wouldn't rather live in a world Feelings about humanity. And I thought I was going to find something there. You thought you were going to find like a hopeful figure? Yeah, I mean, hope, perseverance, generosity. But as soon as I got on the bridge, I realized that all those notions were completely absurd. I mean, I got instantly depressed. First of all, there's this four-mile-long bridge and this one man out there sort of trying to pick out who was going to jump. Yeah, you wrote in the article at one point, you said, first of all, there's the cars and there's the trains and the bridge is shaking. And then there's just like a sea of people, thousands of people in the rain with umbrellas going back and forth on the bridge. And he's just one guy kind of walking up and down. And he has this little moped and does a little cruise on the bridge every once in a while. But even that is a somewhat comical sight to behold. He's on this little broken down moped puttering through the crowd with his big pair of binoculars around his neck. You know, I sort of thought, maybe this isn't even real. Like, maybe this blog is a complete figment of his imagination or a fiction that he constructs, you know, once a week. And I just don't see how this guy can save anybody out here. And you write in your article, he won't really talk to you when you're there on the bridge. Yeah, he is really grumpy and unwilling to acknowledge me. And so give me a typical exchange between the two of you on the bridge. I think I did ask, like, why, why are you standing here as opposed to any other spot on this four mile long bridge? And he turned and lifted his binoculars and focused out towards the river and then brought his binoculars down, turned the other way, put his binoculars up and focused in the other direction on the crowd. That's it. He doesn't even respond. No, it wasn't like I wasn't even there. It was like I was some ghost. And I sort of went through some of this and then I said, maybe, you know, is there a better time for us to talk? And he said to the translator, you know, I can talk to you at lunch. So you go to lunch with him and what happens there? Well, so we were in a little what they call family restaurant near the bridge. And if there are no families present, I mean, it's just workers. And they're pretty hard drinking, in this case, grain alcohol and beer. And so we sit down at the table and Mr. Chen has invited a man to join us whose name is Mr. Shi. And then we are served some food and Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi start really drinking a lot of grain alcohol. And I started to sort of drink with them because it was the convivial thing to do. And then I just realized I'm going to pass out if I try to stay with these guys. I'm literally, I was, my head was spinning and I was, you know, the whole room was revolving. I just was like, and he was, you know, very disappointed. And so he sort of said, you know, just, we're drinking here. This is what we do at lunch and drinking loosens the tongue. And so, you know, get with the program. And if you can't, then why don't we, you know, why don't you put on a dress? But then he, you know, at lunch, he definitely opened up a little bit more. I mean, he wasn't looking at me when he answered questions, but he was answering them and he was speaking more expansively about life on the bridge. Did he explain why it is that he does this? He said he had read a newspaper article about the bridge and about people jumping off the bridge. And, and he himself had grown up in the country outside of Nanjing. So he really related in particular to these people from the villages who came to the bridge to end their lives and whose lives were hard and full of despair. And he completely understood that. So you go back up to the bridge and, and, and he putters off on his moped. And then, and then... Yeah, then he jumped on his moped to go on his rounds. And I didn't have anything to do, but I turned to the translator, Susan, and I said, Hey, let's take a little walk out on the bridge. And so we started walking out over the bridge and we're chatting a little bit. And this guy kind of came lurching by and he, I didn't pay any attention to him, but this guy is about 20 feet, 30 feet ahead of us. And he seems to be climbing up on the railing. And at that point, I just yelled, Hey. And then I said to Susan, he's going to go over. And I started running for him and Susan came running. And I had that one little flash of Mr. Chen saying, you know, some of these, some of these people will really take you with them if they can. They're that desperate. And I had that little flash, like, this would be a stupid way to die. This would be ridiculous if I, you know, go down with this guy. But it didn't come to that because when I got to him, I had my foot on the inside of the sort of the concrete buttress. And I try to flip him back toward me. And he was completely limp. He was like a bag of sawdust. He, he just flipped right back onto me. And I hadn't even really pulled him that hard. It's hard to explain, but like, when I think of it, I just get, I'd have to say just, I have just goosebumps all over my body right now. Because? Because he, he was going to kill himself. And because he didn't. So did you feel good? No, I didn't feel good. I felt like kind of nauseous. I felt like, wow, you know, there, there every week, somebody actually does this thing. And even if we were to clone Mr. Chen and there were 200 of them out there, they'd probably still one a week, someone would figure out how to do it. And then like, oh my God, who's coming next? You know? And so, and so Mr. Chen comes back, right? Yeah. Well, it took Mr. Chen a while to come back on his moped. But when he came, when he showed up, the crowd sort of parted and I was holding on to this man whose name was Fan Ping. And he said to me, step away, which I thought was a really bad idea because we're standing right next to the railing. But he had such command of the situation and all the nuances of the situation that I just stepped away. I just let go and stepped away. And then he said, I want to take your picture. Which seemed like, you know, I didn't even understand what that was about. You take the picture of the guy. Yeah. So he pulls out his cell phone with a camera, takes a picture. And then he says, and now I think I should punch you in the face. Holy. Then he said, you call yourself Chinese. How dare you? How dare you call yourself Chinese? Come up on this bridge with the intention of killing yourself today. You know, you are somebody's son. You know, how dare you? I am going to punch you in the face. I'm going to punch you right now. And the crowd, of course, is like crushing in because they think there's going to, he's going to punch him. And I'm just sitting here, like with my mouth open, as he's saying this. So he kind of takes another step in closer. And Fan Ping says, look, I'm only doing this because my father was in the Red Army and he's lost all of his disability insurance and there's no way for him to live anymore. And I'm a lousy son because I can't provide for him. And all of our documents burned in a fire. And without those documents, we can't get any help. And Mr. Chen says, there's nothing worth this, you know. There's no problem that we can't solve. And then he moves in a little bit closer and he touches his arm to sort of holding him by the elbow with like his right hand. But Mr. Chen says, I, you know, I think I can help you. I don't, I don't like this. I don't like what you're doing here. This isn't the way to solve anything. And at that point, they have each other's word that they're going to meet on Monday morning at Mr. Chen's office. Mike Paterniti. He first wrote about meeting Mr. Chen for GQ magazine. There's a documentary out there about Mr. Chen and the bridge called The Angel of Nanjing. If you or somebody you know might need help, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24-7 by calling or texting 988. Act 3, Yes In My Backyard. Now this story about some of the mysterious things happening on the edges of the city, in the shadow of the city, right under our noses. And to put this story in some context, we're going to turn now to Jorge Just. You may remember Jorge. He's done some stories for our program. He says that when you move to a new city, you cannot get into the regular conversations that everybody else gets into. He found this out a little while back when he did the one thing that everyone in Chicago agrees is the very worst thing that anybody can do. He moved to New York. All New Yorkers want to talk about is what subway train to get to take to get from point A to point B. And it goes on and on. And you can't say anything. You can't be I'll say it if you don't feel like you can. You said that, hold on for a second, I have it here. You said that the EPA, what the EPA was doing with this chocolate factory and ignoring the coal plants, you said, quote, it's like crushing an ant when there's a pack of wolves around, then claiming you have saved people from harm. How about if we say, all right, you know, it's like crushing an ant. Don't be scared of those animal rights people. No, no, I'm just trying to think. I'm going to get you sharks instead. Nobody likes sharks. I just feel like this is just like my entire relationship to government right now could be summed up by this story. OK, there's all these things that are throwing particles in the air. And the only one I like is the one they're getting rid of. Yeah, and, you know, that's my frustration as well. The federal EPA wasn't talking to the press about the chocolate factory. When I called the Illinois State EPA, the manager of compliance and enforcement for the Bureau of Air, a cheerful public servant named Julie Armitage, informed me that there had been a misunderstanding. Yes, she said, the coal plants had belched out too many particles 7600 times, but each of these times was very, very short, at the least a momentary spike, at the most six minutes long. Each one was a blip, she said. Automatic monitoring equipment is going 24 hours a day taking readings. Add up all the blips per year and you get 211 blips per plant per year, meaning that well over 99% of the time, the plants are in compliance with the law. Yes, taken out of context, it appears to be a very bad situation. Put into context, it's virtually a non-issue. And as for the fact that now there may be less chocolate smell in Chicago? You know, I'm not really in a position. Would I prefer to not have had the hullabaloo that broke loose? Yes. And you don't feel any sort of twinge as an environmental regulator who's here to make our world a better place, as you are, that that could be the upside of the whole thing? That the chocolate aroma disappears? Yeah, you don't feel any sort of twinge if that would have happened? Well, you know, unfortunately, my job here is to ensure compliance with environmental laws and regulations. With every sentence is going, this is exactly not the answer we, the people of Illinois, want to hear. We don't want to hear about laws and regulations. Well, but you know, they're there for a reason, and for the most part, you know... Everybody was following the rules, she says. The feds inspected just like they're supposed to. Blommer's was, in fact, emitting too much chocolate. End of story. And then, in the months after I had the conversation with her, the EPA says Blommer fixed the problem, stopped spewing particles into the air that violated the law, and good news, incredibly, what they're emitting still smelled like delicious chocolate. And then, finally, years after we first broadcast this story, in 2024, Blommer's shut down its Chicago factory. They are still manufacturing in Pennsylvania, California, and Canada, but the Chicago plant, they said, just became too expensive to keep running. Old machines kept needing repair. In the end, what killed the chocolate smell in Chicago was not federal regulations. It was not government meddling. It was good old-fashioned old age. Which, I don't know, maybe it's nice not to blame the government for something once in a while. When does that ever happen? Next week on the podcast of This American Life. Next time, I'll buy a galaxy. A smooth ride through sweet space. Slidy on the tongue. Very much a joyous intergalactic journey through merriment of chocolate and pure, undescribable, euphoric satisfaction. Next week on the podcast of This American Life. Hello. Hey, Mom. Yeah. It's Ira. Yeah. Back in the early days of our radio show, I did a series of interviews with my parents that, no kidding, completely changed my relationship with them. Have you done this? Have you gone to a restaurant with Dad and pretended that you didn't know each other? No. No. No. No. But if you did, you're saying that... We've gone to restaurants with you and pretended we didn't know you. Oh, my God. My parents. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.