Podcast Proposal

Abstract Proposal for S-Town Podcast Script

I’m not sure if it’s the lack of a visual narrative that initially turned me off S-Town, but I found myself quite bored with the podcast by Episode 2. I kept listening, and it wasn’t really the suicide of John in Episode 3 that made the storyline more intriguing, but rather, when Brian Reed begins to find out more and more about John’s past. Once these clues started to be revealed, I think that I found myself more and more eager to listen to the podcast than at the very beginning, when everything was being laid out. When thinking about my assignment, I wanted to relate it to a personal experience where I too found out more truth than I was originally looking for. And while I may not have the secrets that S-Town, Alabama has in plain sight (and some not so in plain sight), I recalled a story that actually led me to find more information about my hometown. My podcast will follow a bridge known as the Tappan Zee in my hometown of Westchester, NY and explain information that gives us reasoning as to why the bridge is being replaced, and why it sits in the widest point of the Hudson River. S-Town Assignment Script: Narrated by me, but also features dialogue from conversations. It was a cloudy morning in Westchester County when me and my mom were crossing the Tappan Zee. If you were to look at the GPS screen on the car, you could see the bridge was so long that it covered, along with the Hudson River, the entire screen for at least several miles. "The Tappan Zee so pretty," my mom said. "Look at the view of the Hudson and the Palisades from here," she continued. I couldn’t really agree as I stared out the car window and saw the bridge rusting, as well as the uncomfortable driving conditions with so many cars and trucks, even while it wasn’t rush hour. Having traveled on the George Washington Bridge in the Lincoln Tunnel it struck me as an oddity to make the Tappan Zee at the widest point in the Hudson River when just a few miles south in Yonkers, the Hudson only measures about a mile in width, but in Nyack / Tarrytown, NY area, where the bridge is located, the Hudson is about 4 miles wide. "Why do you think it was made here," I asked my mom. "I'm not sure," she said. It didn’t seem to bother her much but somehow I just needed some sort of explanation on why there was such a vast undertaking in building a bridge in a way that would be so much more expensive, so much less cost-efficient, when it all could’ve been done a simpler manner. Believe it or not it was actually very hard to come across any sort of information just for background purposes. The Tappan Zee is currently being rebuilt, and the new bridge is slated to replace it in the coming years. Most of the information online was about the new proposals of the new bridge and was going to be done with the existing bridge and how the new bridge is going to be funded. But after hours and hours of looking through Google results I stumbled upon a small little website that had a lot of factual information from someone that had lived in Westchester County all of their life. I believe, but I’m not exactly sure where the website is now, but he had some sort of audio recording from an a radio interview back in the 90s we are all lot of the mystery surrounding the Tappan Zee had been explained. The story is actually quite interesting and has nothing to do with really any of the concerns that were like, for example, the existing highway was already in place and it was just the easiest place to connect the bridge. No, actually the New York State Thruway it was being built and it could’ve been built, you know, in any place and could’ve been connected. I could have been done further south in Westchester closer to New Jersey or it could’ve been further up in Rockland County. ​But the story basically goes like this. In the early 1950s before the bridge was built or opened, there was already an agreement in place with the New York and New Jersey transit authority which handled all matters concerning the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland tunnel, and George Washington Bridge. The agreement basically said that any of the toll revenue that was generated by those bridges went to the New York and New Jersey transit Authority and not New York State. This is fair because New York City covers a lot of New York and New Jersey suburbs and so the infrastructure upkeep has to be funded for NYC and not split up all of NY’s government. It was one clause in the agreement that said that anything 25.1 miles north of the Statue of Liberty was exempt from this agreement, and the revenue from tolls then was good to go to the appropriate state in which the infrastructure was located in. So its interesting where the Tappan Zee is located, 25.2 miles north of the statue of liberty. It’s such a weird clause and it gives no explanation to why, you know, it wasn’t an amended or fixed to save taxpayers millions of dollars but rather just worked around and ended with a project that cost so much more to be built somewhere that was just genuinely more expensive and time consuming. With regard to the location, there is no other explanation why the Tappan Zee is in the widest point of the Hudson river. However it’s not the only information I found in finding this website. The website also explained that during the early 1950s on the Tappan Zee was built while the Korean war was currently going on. So there was a shortage of steel and the bridge was built using less of a standard of steel that is normally required in construction projects of this mass. Not only that but the bridge was also intended to carry far less traffic and is currently carrying to this day. Originally made for four-lanes, two westbound two eastbound, the bridge ended up having eight very tight lanes. This me the bridge one of the bridges that was most likely to collapse in the coming years. Fortunately this was not the case but it does bring attention to why the bridge was quickly replaced following more reports on its lack of structural integrity. Overall, It was interesting that a curiosity in my own hometown turned up with so much valuable information. And it shows why we should all do research in our hometowns, too!