Foreclosure

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Speaker 8 Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Speaker 10 Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Speaker 10 Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Speaker 10 When it opened, it was enormous. The Hyatt Regency Hotel opened in downtown Kansas City in July of 1980.
It's 45 stories tall and has 750 rooms.

Speaker 10 One year in the history of the hotel, on July 17th of 1981, 1,500 patrons attended a monthly dance party at the hotel.

Speaker 10 They filled the large lobby, including the suspended walkways that stretched across the atrium from the second, third, and fourth floors.

Speaker 10 Suddenly, everyone on the walkways heard a loud snap from above, and then they were falling. Time slowed, and all sound seemed to disappear.

Speaker 10 as the fourth floor walkway with hundreds of people on it came loose from its steel suspension rods and crashed onto the second floor walkway below it.

Speaker 10 That walkway immediately fell as well, with both of them plummeting to the lobby below. Dozens of people were instantly killed by the collapse of the walkways.

Speaker 10 Most were completely crushed, but some were cut in half or had limbs severed.

Speaker 10 Loose electric wires swung across the lobby and a broken water line from the fourth floor sprayed water down onto the catastrophe below.

Speaker 10 For those people trapped beneath the rubble, there was now a risk of drowning as water began to pool beneath them.

Speaker 10 Someone called 911 and soon emergency workers arrived outside, but they didn't have easy access to the lobby. The whole front of the building was blocked by the collapse.

Speaker 10 They had to call in heavy construction equipment and begin cutting away the debris.

Speaker 10 It was like a horror movie as behind each removed piece of debris was the shocking sight of dozens of horribly mangled bodies.

Speaker 10 Once emergency workers could get inside, they had to quickly usher out everyone who could walk, And then they started triage. In the end, 114 people died.

Speaker 10 The walkways had collapsed due to a fatal engineering flaw. As I mentioned, these were suspension walkways, meaning that they were hanging from the ceiling by steel rods.

Speaker 10 A last-minute change, though, had made this design extremely unsafe. Originally, each walkway was supposed to carry its own weight.
on a set of their own metal fasteners to those steel rods.

Speaker 10 But the builders thought that it would be too difficult to build metal rods that would be long enough to reach all of them.

Speaker 10 So instead of each walkway supporting its own weight, only the top one ended up being supported by the rods connected to the ceiling. The bottom one though?

Speaker 10 Well that was supported by the walkway above it, which put a lot more weight on those fasteners than intended. All it took was 100 patrons to send it crashing down.

Speaker 10 And just as terrifying, the standards were so lax at the engineering firm that as different people moved on and off the project, there was no clear paperwork trail of design changes or review of those changes.

Speaker 10 The engineers, the builders, the owners, and the city inspectors all had an opportunity to catch this flaw, but none of them did. The engineering firm was found most liable.

Speaker 10 They lost their license and were sued for $100 million by various parties.

Speaker 10 The disaster also led to improved safety standards across the country and is now standard freshman course material for any engineering student.

Speaker 10 It shows how engineers are just as responsible for public safety as any firefighter, police officer, or doctor. So if you're a curious listener, engineering might just be the profession for you.

Speaker 10 It's a job that requires constant curiosity, always checking and rechecking, running the math, running it again, being vigilant for any mistakes.

Speaker 10 Engineers may not be on the front lines or thrust into emergency situations, but they make decisions every day that are still a matter of life and death.

Speaker 4 Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Speaker 5 Just ask the Capital One Bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about.

Speaker 2 In a good way.

Speaker 5 He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Speaker 2 Oh, really?

Speaker 6 Thanks, Capital One One Bank guy.

Speaker 3 What's in your wallet?

Speaker 6 Terms apply.

Speaker 1 See capital one.com slash bank.

Speaker 7 Capital One NA member FDIC.

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Speaker 10 Washington, D.C., is often referred to as the halls of power. That's an easy enough metaphor to understand, too.

Speaker 10 The decisions that govern the United States all get made within the hallways of Washington and its surrounding buildings.

Speaker 10 Like many capitals across the world, it's expected that this is where power lives in America, which is why it's so puzzling when official government buildings are absolutely falling apart from neglect.

Speaker 10 Well, I'd like to tell you about one building in particular that was once referenced as the ugliest building in the world in spite of it holding immense importance to the U.S. federal government.

Speaker 10 That would be the the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, six and a half blocks away from the White House.

Speaker 10 It's an imposing concrete structure with enormous square columns and walls of bland inset windows.

Speaker 10 Designed by the Chicago-based architecture firm Murphy Associates, it's the platonic ideal of brutalism, and it's served as the FBI headquarters for the last 50 years.

Speaker 10 And for at least half of that time, the FBI has been trying desperately to get out of it.

Speaker 10 The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been a pillar of American law enforcement ever since its founding in 1908.

Speaker 10 There's a self-made mythos to its existence, that they're the elite stalwart defenders of the American Constitution from terrorists and foreign influence.

Speaker 10 And of course, that mythos is hard to square with the really decrepit office building.

Speaker 10 It was originally designed with a pedestrian observation deck that people could use to survey the surrounding buildings.

Speaker 10 Of course, when the building first opened in 1975, the observation observation deck was immediately closed for security concerns and has remained closed for the last half century.

Speaker 10 For much of the 1970s, the building was a public eyesore. J.

Speaker 10 Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI director who gave the building its name, was privately disgusted with the design, referring to the building as a monstrosity. He would die three years before it opened.

Speaker 10 Now, as hideous as it is to much of the general public, the design of the Hoover Building has a very specific aim, to project strength and intimidation.

Speaker 10 Its namesake was a famous and controversial figure for bringing a tough guy attitude to the Justice Department, cracking down on civil rights figures as much as those suspected of terrorism.

Speaker 10 The unadorned concrete facade of the building is a relic of the days when the FBI wanted to be seen as America's secret police, a poignant irony since it was under construction during the Nixon years and opened a year after the president resigned in disgrace because of the Watergate scandal.

Speaker 10 Starting in the early 2000s, the J. Edgar Hoover Building was more than an eyesore.
It was also a safety hazard.

Speaker 10 Regular inspections of the building determined that the plumbing was out of date, the fire alarms and smoke detectors were in dire need of replacement, and the elevators and air conditioning units were reaching the end of their life cycle.

Speaker 10 What's more, the concrete that made up the walls themselves was starting to crumble.

Speaker 10 It got so bad that they had to install a layer of netting outside the building to protect pedestrians from falling chunks of concrete.

Speaker 9 For over the last decade now, the U.S.

Speaker 10 government has been fielding petitions to either renovate the building or relocate the FBI headquarters altogether.

Speaker 10 The Great Recession of the late 2000s forced the FBI to put any plans on hold as the costs of renovating the building could climb as high as a billion dollars.

Speaker 10 At that point, not money that the government had to spare. Throughout the early 2010s, the U.S.
government fielded proposals from private sector companies on developing a new headquarters for the FBI.

Speaker 9 None of these proposals wound up moving forward.

Speaker 10 At the time of this recording, there has been no effective progress on moving the FBI from the decaying concrete shell of a building.

Speaker 10 The amount of red tape and money required to make that move probably makes it unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Speaker 10 So if you're ever worried that you're being spied on by government spooks at work, consider that maybe they're just there window shopping, looking for a new office.

Speaker 10 Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com. This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

Speaker 10 I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

Speaker 9 And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

Speaker 10 And And until next time, stay curious.

Speaker 4 Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Speaker 5 Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.

Speaker 1 It's pretty much all he talks about.

Speaker 2 In a good way.

Speaker 5 He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Speaker 2 Oh, really?

Speaker 6 Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

Speaker 3 What's in your wallet?

Speaker 6 Terms apply.

Speaker 1 See capital One.com/slash bank.

Speaker 7 Capital One NA member FDIC.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.

Speaker 1 Guaranteed human.