101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [28]
Chapter 40
The World’s Skinniest Buildings
Some fights are hard to get worked up about—like the spat between the Sam Kee Building in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the so-called Skinny Building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over which structure is the thinnest.
At four feet eleven inches at its base (and six feet on its second story, thanks to bay windows), the Sam Kee Building has been named the skinniest commercial building in the world by both the Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Like many other slender buildings, it was built partially out of spite: its lot, originally a normal size, got reduced by twenty-four feet when Vancouver expropriated the space to widen Pender Street in 1912. Designed in 1913, the building’s basement actually extends underneath the sidewalk and used to house the only public baths in Vancouver’s Chinatown (not to mention an escape tunnel for nearby opium dens); the upper two stories were devoted to shops and very narrow apartments.
But watch out, Mr. Kee—Pittsburgh’s Skinny Building wants to challenge its claim to be the thinnest commercial space in the world. At five feet two inches wide from top to bottom, the Skinny Building is indeed more consistently emaciated than the top-heavy Sam Kee. What’s more, at three stories tall, it’s a floor higher. Back in the early 2000s, Pat Clark and Al Kovacik—a consultant and architect who were leasing the top two floors of the Skinny Building as an arts venue, sent photographs to Vancouver’s visitors’ center as proof that their building was narrower.
Clark and Kovacik may have had a point, but unfortunately, their argument may now be moot—in 2007, their landlord refused to renew their lease, and the arts venue was forced to close. With that attraction gone, the building’s main draw is purely its diminutive size, which, as anyone who knows someone obsessed with their weight can attest, is really not that interesting.
Chapter 41
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge, swirling mass of plastic in the middle of the ocean that’s been estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
The garbage patch—if one hundred million tons of debris can be called a patch—was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, oceanographer, and furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who decided to take a shortcut on his way back from a sailing competition in Hawaii. He and his crew sailed their fifty-foot catamaran through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre—an area usually avoided by sailors because of its lack of wind—and were shocked to find themselves navigating through what appeared to be an endless sea of plastic.
Bottle caps, Legos, flip-flops, toothbrushes, Styrofoam cups, footballs, even entire kayaks—Moore had accidentally guided his boat into the final resting place for an incomprehensible amount of plastic trash, pieces of which were close to half a century old. Intrigued and horrified, Moore returned on a research trip two years later and discovered that the patch extended some thirty feet underwater, with increasingly tiny pieces of plastic swirling in the ocean like multicolored fish food. (Since no microbes exist that can digest plastic, it doesn’t biodegrade; instead, exposure to sunlight and currents breaks its polymer chains into smaller and smaller pieces.) In parts, the water of the patch contained six times more plastic than it did plankton—a ratio that has since dramatically increased.
Moore brought himself out of retirement to found the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which is devoted to studying the composition and effects of this giant mass of plastic. This isn’t the cheeriest research assignment; Algalita’s research assignments include examining the stomach contents of dead albatrosses (the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that plastic debris kills more than a million seabirds a year) and investigating how,