This little patch of sidewalk here in downtown New York City is a testament to the enduring
power of spite. As it proudly declares, it has “never been dedicated for public purposes.”
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, and today’s episode of The List Show is all about over-the-top things
done just to send a message to an offending party. We’re going to hit on the origin of
the Hess Spite Triangle, the disturbingly literal origin of the phrase “cut off their
nose to spite their faces,” and the role spite played in sports car history. To the studio!
Back in 1913, New York’s municipal government was seizing private properties as part of a
public works project to extend 7th Avenue. David Hess had owned property in the area.
In the early 1920s, his estate received a tax bill for the remaining portion of the
“lot,"a piece scarcely large enough for the erection of a slot machine.”
When the Hess Estate realized what they had, they leased it to the nearby cigar store. Eventually,
they sold the triangle outright—but the message remains on the ground today,
a not-so-towering monument to the power of pettiness.
The OG of spite idioms refers to those who would cut off their noses to spite
their faces. It’s the proverbial example of doing something—even
something that clearly inflicts harm on oneself—to screw over someone else.
According to a chronicler from the 13th century, there’s a real-life story that
could’ve plausibly given rise to the familiar expression. When they heard that Vikings were
approaching their monastery in Scotland, a group of 9th century nuns apparently took
matters into their own hands. And faces. The nuns’ abbess, Aebbe the Younger,
evidently told the women to cut off their noses and upper lips as a means of self-defense.
It followed a logical, if disturbing, line of thinking. The self-inflicted injuries were
meant to dissuade the invaders from raping the women. If that was the plan, you’d have
to call the results mixed. Though the vikings evidently did not sexually assault the nuns,
they did burn down the monastery with the women inside.
Let’s cleanse the palate with a spiteful story with considerably lower stakes.
After a company called Surrey NanoSystems developed Vantablack, one of the darkest
materials ever created, they licensed it to the British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor,
meaning he was the only one who could legally use the pigment.
Annoyed with this particular bit of art-world exclusivity,
Stuart Semple—a British artist a couple decades younger than Kapoor—created a color he described
as “the pinkest pink” and arranged it so that anyone trying to purchase his very pink pink
had to attest “ … that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor,
you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor.”
Even that wasn’t enough for Semple, especially once Kapoor managed to get his hands on the pink
pigment and posted a very pink middle finger on Instagram. Semple helped create Black 3.0,
an extremely black acrylic paint that he says is equivalent to Vantablack,
as far as the human eye can see.
In what I’m going to call a fitting end to this colorful saga, MIT engineers created a substance
in 2019 that is even blacker than Black 3.0 and Vantablack. Your move, paint-dweebs.
Herzogenaurach, Germany isn’t a particularly large town.
So how did it end up the home of two sporting goods companies: Adidas and Puma? Spite, baby!
Adolf and Rudolf Dassler were brothers with an apparently successful company on their hands in
1936. Athletes wearing their sneakers won a total of seven gold medals at that year’s Olympic games.
Little more than a decade later, though, the company split up. Rudolf helmed Puma while
Adolf created Adidas (not as an acronym for All Day I Dream About Soccer,
as you might have heard—it was just a portmanteau of his first and last names).
The brothers reportedly never spoke again after their falling out, which might help
explain why we never got a good explanation for the sneaker beef (wait a minute—brilliant
business idea? Nope, never mind.)
Some say the rift was caused by one brother trying to turn the other into
authorities after World War II. Others say the conflict was of a more personal
nature—maybe one of the brothers had had an affair with the other’s wife.
It’s always sad to see a family torn apart, but I guess on the bright side, there’s now
one more company around to sign exorbitant sponsorship deals with professional athletes?
Spite may have gifted the world an extra sneaker brand,
but it also stole from us at least one lovely font. For a while, at least.
At the turn of the 20th century,
a company called Doves Press was founded by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker.
The men found some success in business together,
but in less than a decade their relationship hit the rocks. When they divided up assets,
Cobden-Sanderson was granted the use of the Doves Press type, a serif typeface that was
considered elegant and distinctive. The deal said that after Cobden-Sanderson’s death,
the rights to the typeface would go to Walker. But that never happened.
Cobden-Sanderson took matters into his own hands towards the end of his life. In around 170 trips
over the course of several months, he managed to dump around 2600 pounds of mechanical presses
into the Thames River in an effort to guarantee that his beloved typeface would not outlive him.
It was said that Cobden-Sanderson’s motivations may have been snobbish,
as well as spiteful. He apparently didn’t want Walker to use their once-conjointly-owned typeface
on inferior products. In 2014, divers were able to recover about 150 artifacts from the river,
though, preserving some of the history of this particular moment in typography
triviality. Whether the divers were inspired by spite remains unknown.
Cobden-Sanderson may have been a small man, when it comes to matters
of typographic legacy, but he’s got nothing on the Brückenmännchen, or “little bridge man.”
This particular bit of spite took the form of a sculpture
attached to a bridge over the Rhine River in Germany. The bridge connected Bonn and Beuel,
and was the source of some conflict between the two villages in the late 19th century. When the
construction project was finally done, it included a small statue—the little bridge man—defiantly
sticking his little bridge butt in the direction of Beuel. Points to Bonn, perhaps?
But when life handed Beuel a little bridge man, they made little bridge lemonade … or
something. They embraced the tiny guy, putting him on everything from postcards to banknotes.
The bridge was destroyed during World War II, but the Brückenmännchen was recovered and affixed to
a new bridge. In 1960 he was finally destroyed in a senseless act of butt-busting vandalism,
but today a replica proudly stands on Germany’s Kennedy Bridge.
“Don’t mess with a redneck who has a backhoe.” Those words, offered up by farmer Rhett Davis,
might’ve been good advice for his neighbors in Hooper, Utah.
After a dispute that centered on the apparent smelliness of Davis’s property, the two parties
reached an impasse. Davis was willing to pay for half of a fence, while his neighbors were not.
In response, the longtime Hooper resident erected what he called Redneck Stonehenge,
popping three junked cars nose-first into the dirt near the dividing line of the two properties.
To Davis’s credit, he did say that he would remove the offending “fence” if anyone complained.
As he said, “I made my point. I'm an easygoing guy. I'll take them down."
A slightly more traditional fence was built for reasons of spiteful commerce in the mid-1930s.
Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics played at Shibe Park. Fans had to pay to attend games, of
course, but plenty of spectators could get around ticket fees by watching games from nearby homes.
Second-story windows and ersatz bleachers built on rooftops provided a good view of the action down
below. Some people even charged admission to their unofficial extra seats outside of the stadium.
By opening day of 1935, the team had evidently had enough.
The field’s outfield fence was dramatically raised to block the view of freeloading spectators (and,
perhaps more to the point, to cut out the team’s de facto competition for prime baseball watching
real estate). Though the new structure was dubbed “Connie Mack’s Spite Fence,”
the real mastermind behind the change was the team’s owner, Jack Shibe.
The spite fence ultimately failed to turn the team’s fortunes around,
though. By the mid-1950s, they relocated to Kansas City. Today,
the Athletics (often referred to as the A’s) play their home games in Oakland.
If you take a visit to the Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, you’ll probably notice a grave
that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest. It commemorates Mary Moriarty,
but it’s really a monument to her husband Daniel’s ability to hold a grudge.
Though Daniel was a successful businessman who made a pretty penny in the real estate game,
he felt that his “new money” status prevented him from gaining the social status he deserved.
(A grievance that you and all your millionaire friends can no doubt relate to.)
When forced to choose a permanent resting place for his beloved wife, Moriarty took
the opportunity to stunt on his haters. He erected a massive, 80-foot grave marker that
took almost 20 years to complete. The inordinate height of the grave may have been conceived as an
opportunity for his late wife to metaphorically “look down” on the couple’s critics. Classy.
There are enough spite houses out there to build a whole spite village. And after you hear some of
these stories, you may wish that their creators could be forced to coexist with one another.
Let’s start with Dr. John Tyler, who lived in Frederick, Maryland back in the early 1800s.
City officials had planned to build a road right through Tyler’s land.
Rather than let that come to pass, Tyler did what any spiteful homeowner would.
He dug into the legal code and discovered a law prohibiting road construction that would
go through existing buildings. He quickly got a builder to start construction on a structure
right where the proposed road would come through. When officials saw what had happened,
they were forced to abandon their plans, a victim to close reading and an absolute
dearth of civic-mindedness on Tyler’s part. The spite house was eventually completed at
three stories tall. Tyler even rented it out, earning more revenue out of his antagonism.
Al Ba’sa, a.k.a. the Grudge, is a narrow ode to narrow mindness.
The Beirut building is just 13 feet at its widest, and 2 feet wide at its narrowest.
It seems to have been built primarily to block the view of a neighboring property—a
property belonging to the owner of the Grudge’s brother.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, is home to some of the United States’ most prestigious universities,
but that didn’t stop Francis O’Reilly from doing something pretty stupid.
In 1908, O’Reilly wanted his neighbor to buy an 8-foot-wide parcel of land. When he was rebuffed,
he responded by building a spite house on the property. Today,
the oddly shaped building is home to Annie Hall Interiors, a local interior design firm.
About a century earlier, Captain Avery Brown built a home in Mystic, Connecticut.
Brown had a nice view of the nearby river. Until one John Fellows got involved, at least.
Fellows, for evidently spiteful reasons that remain unclear,
built a giant home directly blocking Brown’s view of the water.
Instead of a whole spite house, sometimes all you need is a little resentment in your heart
and one spite wall. Ireland’s Jealous Wall is one such structure. It looks like the
partial remnants of an ancient building, but it’s accurately been labeled a “sham ruin.”
Sibling rivalry was at the heart of its construction. Robert Rochfort built it,
supposedly to block the view of his brother’s more ornate home next-door.
I guess Robert succeeded in obscuring his own view of his brother’s good fortune,
but in doing so he forced himself to look at an odd fake ruin. Mission accomplished?
Before he became sports car royalty, Ferruccio Lamborghini was a tractor
manufacturer and generally happy Ferrari owner. At one point, the clutch on his car
wasn’t working properly, leading the tractor man to approach Enzo Ferrari.
There’s some disagreement over the exact sequence of events, but eventually Lamborghini
became incensed enough at his countryman that he vowed to build a superior car.
He enlisted the help of five former Ferrari employees,
and eventually did release a series of celebrated luxury cars to rival Ferrari.
Around the same time, Enzo got into another spat that helped give birth to a competitor. When Henry
Ford II wanted his company to get into the racing game, he approached Ferrari with an
offer to buy a controlling stake in the Italian company. Ferrari initially agreed to the deal,
but eventually pulled out, enraging Ford. In response, the American ordered his company
to build a car that could beat Ferrari at France’s famed 24 Hours of Le Mans race.
That challenge turned into the Ford GT40. By 1966,
that car successfully knocked Ferrari off its perch as the champion of Le Mans.
All this spite, productive and otherwise, has left a bad taste in my mouth. So,
let’s end with one story of spite overcome. The story of Connecticut’s Collinsville Spite House,
from the 1800s, follows the familiar contours of many of the items on this list.
A property owner with plenty of extra money and ill will builds a structure to stick their
thumb in their neighbors’ collective eye. In this case, the property owner was a butcher,
and his chosen medium was a narrow building with venetian blinds blocking the windows.
This spiteful saga does have a bit of a happy ending, though. When the man’s
son inherited the property, he promptly tore it down in a gesture of good will.
Leave it to the son of a butcher to know when to squash some beef.
We’ve got an upcoming episode about the animals of
Chernobyl. If you know any fun facts about these radioactive critters,
drop it in the comments for a chance to be featured in that episode. Thanks for watching!