The battle over a chocolate factory

Support for this American life comes from Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which uh means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing, it's built to help you find and own a home. Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. So when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com Okay, this happens to be Chicago, but every city has a place like this. That weird, desolate area at the far end of to wn. We're half mile west of the old abandoned steel mills. We're 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 dire ction. Everybody down here called it Mount Piscini, for the Ottoman who let the city put it here. Notice all these uh what would you call it uh tire marks? Uh this street is used as uh uh for drag rac ing year round. Really? Yeah, because it's basically far enough away from the police that they don't My guide is Charlie Gregerson, who grew up down here. He shows me where a lake, like Calumet, used to be back in the forties 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 seventies 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. was the north end of the d ump. And actually we picked I picked up a few pieces of uh stock exchange ornament right out of the lake. But of course most of it had been ground right into the uh dirt because they had bulldozers that would just you 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 it. And 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 a strange scene, like this apocalyptic, you know, death of a city. Oh yeah, well there were I remember I remember seeing one of these big uh phoenix columns that I knew had come out of the Garrick Theater 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. And at that point, um the Garrick had been gone for almost 10 ye ars. 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 co urse. Charlie says it 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 a way, might as well be another c ity . But 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 sig ht. WBEC Chic Our program today was first broadcast a few years ago. It's in three acts . Act one , Brooklyn Archipelago. In that act, some passengers set sail one day on a three hour tour, a three hour tour, and end up getting lost in the wilderness, one fears for his life on a string of islands that is just outside a very, very big c ity. Act two, troubled bridge over water, a guy goes to a remote spot to help people who do not want to be help ed. Act three. Please in my backyard. Controversy over industrial odors coming from a factory. Odors that for once people want to keep coming , stay with us. Support for this American life comes from Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit Schwab dot com to learn more. A program note we have a new episode out this week titled Call Your Parents, which actually originated as a bonus episode just for our This American Life Partners, people who have signed up to support the show financially. So if you listen to this new episode and enjoy it, know that there are dozens more personal behind-the-scenes episodes just like this if you sign up as a this American Life Partner, but more than the bonus episodes, you will help make it possible for us to continue making the show that you hear each week. We're counting on the number of life partners growing over time. We're counting on this program growing. That's the only way the budget numbers work out long term. Head to this American Life dot org slash life partners. That link is also in the show not es. This American Life, today's show is a rerun. Act one, Brooklyn Archipelago . Bret 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 Build ing. These things happen, or at least they did happen, to Alex Jar ov. Alex is 17 years old. He moved to the US 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 um 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 Ale x. 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 Jarov, 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 twenty five and thirty years old. Alex was twelve. One of the musicians he met that day was Roman Godjilov, who immediately took to the young Alex. Well he had this uh uh blink in his eyes. It's sometimes you see extraordinary person and uh you know you kind of know this. You know, he wasn't uh appear to us as twelve-year-old at that moment. At twelve years old, he was writing songs that I was writing at 18. And after this, you know, we've been together all the time. What does that mean? Krusha is means uh Lil 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 Caruso and Treasure Island. Alex was particularly fond of th ose. 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 Lubaconsky, decided to take a nice little boat trip in Jamaica Bay, the body of water that wraps around the southern end of Brooklyn. The three of us decided to just get like ten gallons of gas, and uh 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 on the yacht. And uh I started saying, oh, our goal is the open ocean. We let's sail to Poland, I told him Plan was just to go to the bridge, under the Rakaway Bridge, then turn around, and then come back. It should have taken about uh forty minutes, ye ah. Things started to go wrong almost immediat ely. 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 he was already like um he didn't control the situation by that time as As a responsible journalist, I should say for the record that Roman does have one objection to Alex's version of events. I it wasn't a Rom, by the way. It was a cognac. I don't know why everybody puts Rome. So it was a cognac. You sure? It was a latrec, yes, it was latrec, cognac. I don't know why how come it's become Rome. It's probably Alex told it was Rome, but it was cogna c. Not a little bit, it was a lot. We was out of commission, yeah. Ye Iah, 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 we knew how to drive it so like it didn't seem pretty hard. You 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 they almost crashed into a small island. Gas was running low, but they figured that if worse came to worse they could always put up the sails and still make it h ome. Then they got caught in a strong current that turned the boat in circles. The perfect time you would think to begin to panic, or if you're the kind of person who forgets trouble the moment you're out of it, or even while you're in it. The perfect time to shoot off all the boat's flares into the water just for fun. Finally the series of mistakes reached a critical mass. They had no cell phone. Romans had died when they fell in the water. No flares, no captain, and almost no gas. Even Alex had to admit they were in trouble. We realized we weren't gonna make it anywhere and we're like uh in the morning we'll figure out what to do. So we uh went to sle ep. It was a glorious spring morning on Jamaica Bay, sun glinting off the water, gulls calling overhead, as our young pleasure cruisers slumber ed. The light filtering into the boat's cabin woke Roman and Alex Glubachonsky first and they came up on de ck. What they saw was not good. After drifting through the night, the boat had come to rest in the shallows of a small bay alongside an uninhabited landmass. Stretching out behind them, they could see a long furrow where the tide had dragged them deep into thick mud, and as they stood there, blinking and wondering how this might have happened, the wind carried them another ten feet inland. They could see the skyline of Manhattan on the horizon, the runways of JFK Airport a little closer, and signs of civilization in every direction. They could even see boats passing by in the distance, but these were too far away to take any noti ce. It was obvious that they were, in a word, shipwre cked. The hungover sailors sat down to decide what to do. Roman and Globachonsky were in favor of waiting to be rescued or for the tide to rise and pull them out again. Meanwhile, Alex was formulating his own plan. Beyond the island they were closest to lay another landmass, which Alex was sure led somew here. His idea was to swim to it, walk to civilization, catch a bus somewhere, and bring back help for his friends, who, as Alex remembers it, thought the plan was frankly idiotic. These are islands, said Roman, who in truth had actually been out on the bay before and was in a position to know . But Alex was sure that Roman was w rong. So Alex stripped to his underwear. He put what he thought he might need in a waterproof plastic He brought his Metro card, for the bus he was gonna swim to, an expired passport, for ID, and his favorite Buddhist medallion, for luck. He wrapped his clothes in a cellophane blanket and bid his friends farewell. Roman watched him disappear into the sur f. Of course I tried to stop him, I tried to give him reasonable thing, but he got a little bit too much excited, so I decided to give him a challenge in life. What should I just knock him down and say, stop it? You know? He wanted to swim, you know, he wanted to swim and uh he sw he sw am. I swam really like really violently to get myself warmed up, and by the middle I got really tired and it was really cold, and I'm like, oh, it's it's much worse than I thought. And uh and there's birds flying like like peeking on me. I'm like other these crazy strange far away birds are gonna bite me or or something, you know. And I and I got really lucky because my legs suddenly hit the hit the bottom and I'm like and I got was so happy when I came out there I was so cold but I was happy okay and I was definitely sure that it was civilization because tall buildings were right behind the trees they were like I'm still not sure I understand why you left your friends though. Because I thought we were gonna be stuck there for a really long time, maybe for the whole day. The only thing I could do is just try to get to civilization and especially these islands they were, uh they were pressuring me to go there, you know, they were so close and I'm like and I got really bored, you know, I wake up in the morning, I don't wanna stay in one spot on the yacht and like and and and think about how we gonna get saved, you know, I really wanna do something. And uh I'm like, okay, I'm gonna have this this little adventure, I'm gonna go out and try to make it somewhere. And I did. Except he didn 't. Soon he realized that he was indeed on another And he wasn't about to do that. He was al one. So Alec set about doing all the things a good castaway should do. He wrote a giant help in the sand for the benefit of the planes landing at JFK. He circumnavigated the island looking for supplies. He found a stick and a piece of red cloth and made a flag to signal passing ships. Then he found several big pieces of styrofoam and some wood and spent an hour or two fashioning a raft, but it collapsed when he sat down on it. Undeterred, he went back to searching for something that would be his ticket off the island. And then he found it. It was the hollowed out carcass of a jet ski, or as he calls it, a scooter. I knew I hundred percent knew that it was gonna float, although it was pretty badly dug into the sand, and um as I was digging out the scooter, something really bad happened. Like there was a piece of glass under it and I didn't see. I was just digging and digging. And I didn't have any any shovel or anything. And I cut my finger really bad. I started getting huge amounts of blood was coming out and I had this And it was made even more maddening because the city was right there. I was like thinking, how in the hell did I get myself into this situation? I I never believed that something like this could happen in the in like in New York City, you know, like in as in such a huge city that you could see sky cr skyscrapers like ten miles away and on the other side you can die looking at them you know like and also I got a little mad at the city of New York like I couldn't I could understand if they had just one payphone there or at least I don't know like a button to press to to know that you're there you know By probably six o'clock in the evening, it was getting a little dark. All my excitement has fled away and um I've uh I got very cold, so I was like shaking, you know, shivering and no help at all. So I'm like, wow, this is gonna get really bad. Were you hungry at this point also? I was very hungry and I was very thirsty. And I found limes. I try to uh Ah yes, the ducks. You'll wanna 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 so to drink some blood and to cut them open and use them like to warm mys elf. I had this strange idea about uh use them as slipp ers. I even had after that I even had this psychedelic idea of uh floating on the ducks, making a raft a raft out of the ducks. Imagine a a man with uh with strings attached to the ducks uh floating on the water so it's like this duck rider you know Totally normal for uh uh for uh a Russian hiker to go and pick up a duck and uh not just to kill it but to eat it like I'm still I 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 um uh you just go after it with a sti ck. 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 g it's a funny situation, but I really g tr uh got the feeling of what what is it like being on a desert island. I felt like uh Robinson Crusoe, you know. I uh 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 the ghost of your death close by you know so I can smell the smell my uh smell my death in the a ir. 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 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 Canarsi, 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. Rufflebar itself had been the site of several of the latter. Since the Civil War it had housed a ferry stop, a resort hotel, and even a short-lived doomed community of some forty build ings. We stopped in front of a concrete foundation. A building of some kind was here. Oh look that this is a cool thing. This is one of the world war two things that's here. Like you open them up and you can go inside there's like a room in there. Might be like 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, we take one look at Alex and wisely move away . Be cause it seems like it should be like as we turn in, there should be more shoreline here. And really maybe maybe the wo o Yep, that's exactly it. Oh wow. That this is the scooter I tried it. Yeah, let me show you maybe. Maybe you'll see the glass and stuff. As we search for Alex's Buddhist medallion that he'd left in the excitement of the helicopter rescue, we walk across a plane of thick dry grass, matted down like a carpet. Underneath you can hear shells crunching and mysterious things scurrying aro und. 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 w ater. And then there's this reminder of civilization . Allo ? 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 ho ur Alex was finally rescued after seven hours, thanks to Roman and Globachonsky. Back on the boat, they were having a fine old time. 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 was just, you know, sitting on the boat and uh you know smoking the last tobacco that we have left. And we make a deal that we're not gonna eat each other if we're really gonna get hungry. So basically we was having fun. You know just a little bit, no, no hustle, no nothing, you know, very quiet, nice weather. Oh so you didn't so you you were actually holding off signaling the helicopters while you had a nice day? Yeah, of course. It was a nice da y. 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 passen ger. When the helicopter came back for Alex, cold, exhaustion, and dehydration had left him in a trance-like, almost wild st ate. 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 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 anim als. 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 uh what's it called like a secret or it's hiding or it's like they they attract me in the way that they 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 lo oks. 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 uh I think 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 uh strictly because I was with the right people at the right time, like uh 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 where if you believe you should have an adventure you do? In which each of your mistakes doesn't narrow your life but expands it? In which the worst thing that could possibly happen is being bored, and you can go to sleep on stormy seas and trust that when you wake up, if you're very lucky, you'll be in Uta h. What I'm trying to say is this: Alex does something I never in a million years would have thought possi ble. He makes me think it might be cool to be a teenager again. There's a story that back in the eighteen thirties, a ship carrying fifty-four thousand dollars in Mexican gold was hijacked by pirates outside Jamaica Bay, and that the treasure was buried somewhere near Ruffle Bar. On our way back from the island I tell Alex this and he listens with great interest. If he found the treasure he wants to know. Could he keep it? Maybe I say, if he didn't tell anyb ody. To which Alex answers precisely as I know he will, the only way he possibly can. He says, but what if I told everyb ody? Brad Martin. He's a correspondent for GQ Magazine and the author of Difficult Men Behind the Scenes of a Creative revolution. Today's program, uh like I said earlier, is a rerun. Alex is now 37, he's a DJ, making electronic music under the name Duck Hunter, which is a name actually inspired by the ducks in this story. He's at Duck HunterOfficial on Instagram and his music's on SoundCloud and Spotif y. Coming up, the thing about Chicago that nobody outside Chicago believes about Chicago, but that actually is totally and completely true. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continu es. Support for this American life comes from Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own, plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit Schwab dot com to lear n more. Support for this American life comes from Rula. Ever thought about getting therapy, but then talk yourself out of it? It's too expensive, insurance confusion, or you don't have enough time? Rula makes accessing quality mental health care affordable. Find a great therapist in as little as five minutes. Rula works with your insurance company, offering personalized cost estimates up front with no hidden fees. So head to rula.com. That's r-u-la-com to find a therapist the easy way. Support for this American life comes from Alexa Plus. Say hello to Alexa Plus and see how the experience is tailored to you. Planning a vacation? Ask Alexa to recommend a trip. Use Alexa Plus to find the name of that song you love, discover new favorite shows or recipes, and so much more. Ask Alexa Plus anything. And now Alexa Plus is free with Prime on your Amazon devices, like Echo and Fire TV. Get started at Amazon.com slash Alexa P lus. This American Life from Ira Glass. Each week on a program, of course we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, in the shadow of the city, stories about things happening out of sight for most of us, but very close to us. We've arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, Troubled Bridge Over W ater. So in 2003, on the edge of a city halfway around the world, in Nanjing, China, a man named Chen Tsa, Mr. Chen, headed out to a bridge, away from his wife and daughter. Four miles long, covered with slogans that celebrate the worker, four lanes of traffic, thousands of pedestrians on the top deck, two train tracks on the lower deck, over the Yangtze River in Nanjing, a city of nine million. Estimates are fuzzy, but the best guess back then was that one person per week took their own life jumping off this bridge. Just a heads up, by the way, that this story is going to discuss suicide. Mr. Chan decided that he wanted to try to keep these people from jumping. And he started to, single handedly at first, then with an occasional volunte er. The blog that he kept about this is the most sober, taciturn, non boastful account of saving lives that you could possibly imagine. Occasionally Mr Cham will insert his feel ings. Beware heavy thoughts, he declares to himself in one entry. How I wish that he will soon be free of this shadow, he says about an old man that he saved in another . But mostly it's just the facts. Here's a translation from the Chinese. On july twenty fifth, at ten thirty in the morning, I discovered a woman lying on the bridge railing, on her belly, weeping. I went to her. She wiped her eyes, she said she was just playing, and walked toward the center of the bridge. ten I discovered that she had already climbed up on the bridge railing. I restrained her and forced her onto a remote bed. She is from Nanjing's Jiany district . Her last name is Zhao, and today she's forty five years old. Because her husband, surname Li, and fifty one She thought killing herself would be bet ter. However, she is silent when she thinks of her 15-year-old son. March twenty first, two thousand ten. Yesterday at three oh five He had drunk a lot of alcohol and was planning to jump over the bridge railing. I at once restrained him and dragged him to saf ety. As we spoke, I learned a situation was actually quite funny. He was thinking about Thomas. Yesterday afternoon he started drinking with his friends, and the more he drank, the angrier he got. He believed that killing himself would make her realize that not one scent had come to him. He then said another funny thing. His mother's colleague said that the bridge is haunted and could take one's soul. I said, haha, it is haunted by drunk ghosts. And I took him home. This was the calmest, simplest rescue I've made in recent ye ars. Many of Mr. Chen's entries are about the people that he does not save. February 15th, 5.30 in the morning, a middle-aged man jumped to his death. It's recorded at this time that he was holding a photograph of his famil y. August 10th, 2008, Saturday afternoon at 1.40 p.m., a young woman 300 meters from the south end of the bridge climbed onto the bridge railing. I immediately started my moped, but because I accelerated too quickly the moped leaked oil and ignited. I had to run to her. But when it was two hundred meters away she jumped into the Yangt ze. At the end of each year, mister Chen does an inventory of how things are going on the bridge. This one is from the end of 2009. He wrote that um since he began back in 2003, he'd saved at that point 174 people from killing themselves, counseled another 5,150 on the bridge and 16,000 on the phone. Fifty-one thousand people had texted him. Total days volunteering to that point? Mike Paternity wrote a magazine article about Mr. Chen. He first heard about him years ago from news reports. I thought maybe maybe I'll see him in action. Maybe I'll get to see him save somebody. Just his backstory, I mean I actually came I had come from um Cambodia . So I was I was covering these genocide trials, so I I wasn't you know, the I didn't have the most optimistic feelings about humanity. Um and I thought I was gonna find something there. Yeah. I mean hope, perseverance, generosity. Uh but as soon as I got on the bridge I realized that all those notions were completely absurd. I mean I I got instantly depressed. First of all, there's this four-ilem-long bridge and this one man out there sort of trying to pick out who was gonna jump. Yeah, you read in the article at one point you said first of all there's the cars and there's the trains and the bridges shaking, and then there's just like a sea of people, thousands of people. Aaron Ross Powell And he has this little moped and does a little cruise on the bridge every every once in a while, but um even that is, you know, somewhat a somewhat comical sight to behold. You know, he's on this little broken down moped putt putting through the crowd with his big pair of binoculars around his ne ck. You know, I sort of thought m maybe this isn't even real. Like maybe this blog is a complete figment of his imagination of 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 and you write in your article, he won't he won't really t talk to you when when you're when you're there on the bridge. Yeah, he is really grumpy and unwilling to acknowledge me. And and so and so give me a typical exchange between the two of you on the brid ge. I think I did ask, like why why why are you standing here as opposed to any other spot on this four mile long brid ge? And uh he turned and lifted his binoculars and focused um out toward the river and then brought his binoculars down, turned the other way, put his binoculars up, and focused um in the other direction on the crow d. Maybe you know, is there a better time for us to talk? And he uh said to the translator, you know , I can talk to you at lun ch. So you go to lunch with them and and w and what happens there ? Aaron Ross Powell Well so we were in a little uh 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, uh grain alcohol and beer. Mm-hmm . And so we sit down at the table and mister Chen has invited um a man to join us whose name is mister Chi uh thing to do. And then I just realized I I I'm gonna pass out if I try to stay with these guys. Like I'm literally I was my head was spitting and I was, you know, the whole room was revolving. I I just was like and he was you know very disappointed and 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 if you you can't, then why don't we, you know, why don't you put on a dress? But then he you know, it lunch he definitely opened up a little bit more. I mean he w he wasn't looking at me um when he answered questions, but he was answering them and he was speaking more expansively about life on the bridge. Aaron Powell Did he explain why it is that he does this? Aaron Powell 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 uh 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 har d and full of despair, and he completely understood that So you go back up to the bridge and and and he he putters off on his moped and then and then he jumped on his moped to go on his rounds and um 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 w came lurching by and he I didn't pay any attention to him, but this guy's about twenty feet, thirty feet ahead of us, and he seems to be climbing up on the rail ing. And at that point , I just yelled, he y. And then I said to Susan, he's gonna 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. Uh they're that desper ate. And I I had that little flash like this would be a stupid way to die. This would be ridiculo us if I go down with this gu y. 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 s and I tried to flip him back toward me and uh he was completely limp. He was like a bag of sawdust. He ha he just flipped right back onto me. Um and I hadn't even really pulled them that hard . It's hard to explain, but like when I think of it, I just get I'd have to say I just I I have just goosebumps all over my body right now. Be cause he uh he was gonna kill hims elf. And because he didn' t. So d did you feel good ? Um Um no, I didn't feel good. I felt like kinda nauseo us. I felt like wow, you know, they're they're every week somebody actually does this thing. And even if we were to clone Mr. Chen and there were two hundred of them out there, they'd probably still one a week someone would would figure out how to do it. And then like, oh my God, who's coming next? You know? Yeah, well, it took Mr. Chen a while to come back on his mop ed. But when he came, when he showed up, the crowd sort of parte d and I was holding on to this man whose name was Van P ing and he said to me, Step away, which I thought was a really bad idea, 'cause 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 uh and then he said, I want to tak e You take the picture of the guy. Yeah. Mm-hm m. So he pulls out his cell phone with a camera, takes a picture. And then he says, um and now I think I should punch you in the face. Holy then he said, You call yourself Chin ese. How dare you? How dare you call yourself Chin ese? Come up on this bridge with the intention of killing yourself tod ay. You know, you you are somebody's son. You know, how d are Like with my mouth open as you say this. So he kind of takes another step in clos er. 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 'cause I can't provide for him and all of our documents burned in a fire and without those documents, we 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 sol ve. And then he moves in a little bit closer and he tou ches Mike Paternity. 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 and Crisis Lifeline is available twenty-four-seven by calling or texting nine eight eight . Eck three, yes in my backy ard. 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 um to put this story in some context, we're gonna 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 is 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 like, you know, they discovered a tenth planet and they'll be like, Well, well, you would take the DMZ, you know to get to the tenth planet. It's inescapable. And when you that conversation finally peters out, it somehow and it it doesn't fail, it turns into a conversation about cell phone reception. You you can't get into the you can't get into the conversation. You don't know where the dead spots are. So so you can't com do any small talk. So what happens is the small talk becomes oh you just moved to New York. Where are you from? Oh, you're from Chicago. How do you like New York? How do you like New York? Everybody wants to know how you like New York because they want you to say, New York's the greatest place that I've ever been to. And I've I've burned all of my connections to anywhere that I've ever been before because I love it so much here. When in fact people would say, so how do you like New York? And you're like, well, you know, I like it, it's big, it's stuff, but I r I really like Chicago, you know? Oh really, what's Chicago like? Chicago's this y wonderful dreamland where there's a bar on every corner and you know, the bridges smell like chocol ate. And then you'd pretty much have a a silence and you're the ice in your glass would clink a couple of times and then they'd say the bridges smell like chocolate. And then I'd describe how wonderful it is that the bridges would smell smelled like chocolate. And this is something that people in New York have never ever ever ever ever ever believed. But if you get up early in the morning and it's sort of quiet out and you go to the right bridge and it's just that sort of magic uh twinkling hour where the sun's coming up and and there's you're in a big city but nobody's aro und. Every now and again they smell like brow nies . Yeah. Well that that's actually true. That's very very true. I I can say it's it's true. A and the reason why is because there's there's a chocolate plant on the west side that spews uh that spews the smell of cho colate. Yeah, the smell of magic. To say somet to say like a the bridge smells like chocolate doesn't convey like what actually happens. What actually happens is that when you're walking across a bridge and you're dying cars and it's a bridge over a dead river in the middle of a part of town that is industrial and totally unnatural. You're you you just like sort of walk into this cloud of like the sweetest memory you have of cookies being made as a child, your sweetest childhood memory. You can walk into that and you can walk into it by surprise in the middle of the day, in the middle of a c ity. Now now you know that um that that all this is ending, right? I know. I know. It's like a thousand little stabs in the heart. Thanks to the federal govern ment. It's like a million little stabs in the he art. What happened is this. Somebody complained about the chocolate smell. They complained to the Environmental Protection Agen cy. And the federal government, never responsive to even a single complaint of from any its citizens anywhere in the country, leapt into action. They sent inspectors to the Blummert Chocolate, which has been making chocolate bars and other goodies on Chicago's West Side since nineteen thirty nine. Inspectors found that too much cocoa dust was going into the air, more than is legal under federal standards. The plant installed filtering equipment. In fact they say they'd been planning to get that equipment in place even before the EPA dropped by. In any case, fewer cocoa particles in the a ir means less delicious chocolatey aroma . It's kind of curious to think of like, you know, one small chocolate factory has, you know, somebody complained and they went out there and looked and they' said, Yes, theres a problem and we're gonna fix it. But yet you know, you have thousands of times where it's happened at the power plants and nothing's happened. That's Brian Urbashevsky, director of environmental health Programs for what was called, back when we first broadcast today's show, the American Lung Association in Chicago, is now called the Respiratory Health Associ ation. He points out, in fact, it was widely reported in Chicago, that the Illinois Attorney General's office had documented over seventy-six hundred violations, similar to the chocolate company violation, at six coal plants in Illinois in six years, back when we first broadcast today's sho w. And never went after any of those coal plants. Okay, let's let's step back a minute, because chocolate factories are not a major source of this fine particle pollution. When you look at power plants, they're responsible for about a quarter of the problem. And chocolate, is chocolate a quarter of the problem as well? No, no, no, no. It I it it's probably uh you know far, far, far less than one percent. Oh. Um now there's a quote that you gave um uh where you uh used an animal metaphor that I've seen quoted widely in a million uh articles that I just would like to you to repeat here for our listeners. Oh I don't know if I can. I actually uh if this is the wolves and the ant thing, I actually got San Francisco animal activists after me for that thing, saying that wolves are not dangerous to humans. Um 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 har m. How about if we say all right , you know, it it's like crushing an ant and uh Don't be scared of those animal rights people. No, no, I'm just trying to think I was gonna use sharks instead. Nobody likes sharks. I just think this is just like my entire relationship to government right now can be summed up by this story. Okay, 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. Um 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 seventy six hundred times. But you see 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 twenty four hours a day taking readings. Add up all the blips per year, and you get two hundred eleven blips per plant per year. Yes. Taken out of context, it it appears to be um a very bad situation, put into context. It's a s it' s virtually a non issue. And as for the fact that now there may be less chocolate smell in Chic ago? You know, I I 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 That the that the chocolate aroma disappears? Yeah. You don't feel any sort of twinge if that would have happened ? Well he you know unfortunately, uh my job here is to ensure compliance with um environmental laws and regulations. And and wherever this sentence is going, this is exactly not the answer. We the people of Illinois wanna hear Well, but you know, they're they're there for a reason and and for the most part, you know. Everybody was following the rules, she says. The feds inspected just like they're supposed to. 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 Blummer 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 cho colate. And then, finally, years after we first broadcast this story, in 2024 , bombers shut down its Chicago factor y. 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 wh ile. When does that ever hap pen? Cream eggs. On the way to the train station. In the wind and leaves comes the fun of a cream egg. No one knows that I have it. It's so small. Lots of thick chocolate with stringy sugar, soft and sticky. I think I've got some on the n ose. Today's episode of our show was produced by Diane Cook, Robin Semyon, and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Jay Marie, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollack. Senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Thea Challener, Seth Lynn, Tommy Andreas, and B.A. Parker, music up from Jessica Hopper, production up on today's rerun from Matt Tierny and Chloe Weiner. Also Michael Komite, Marley Marcello, and Stone Nelson. Special thanks today to Brett Wien of the American Foundation This American Life.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX at the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, who asked me to tell you he can kick the ass of anybody in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. And this is something that people in New York have never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever believed. Americas, back next week with more stories of this American life