This is the 99% invisible city.

I'm Roman Mars.

For the first time in a long time I'm in our office in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

A couple people actually still work here, two people can occupy the space without violating any social

distancing guidelines. There's two entrances. There's two different bathrooms. There's two different

kitchens. I usually work at home. But today I'm here because our first book, The 99% Invisible City, has just been released into the world.

Since it's a guide to the city with stories and histories of the headquarters. But before we even leave the office, just looking at the window, there's a brick

building next door. And the tops of its walls are dotted with a bunch of square metal plates.

These anchor plates are a few inches across.

They're pretty thin and they're spun in a bunch of different orientations.

So, even though they're painted to blend in with a brick, once you notice them, they kind of stand out.

And you could think of them like giant washers with bolts or rods tying them into the bricks and

helping brace them against the facade.

And these ones happen to be square, but I've seen others in the neighborhood that are round or

octagonal. In fact, anchor plates like this are pretty common in the Bay Area

in part for seismic reasons. They help make sure that loose bricks don't fall off buildings and hurt people during earthquakes.

These particular ones are way up high where the walls overrun the roof.

So there's a parapet up there where the bricks can't be braced against the main building.

And so someone installed these and connected them to metal braces on the rooftop that you can't actually see from below.

In other places though, you can see anchor plates all the way down a facade, and in those

cases they have a ton of work to do. They help hold up entire masonry walls that might otherwise be at risk of total collapse.

In the book, we have an illustration with a bunch of different shapes that you can look out for in whatever so you're in.

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