This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In 1914 in Manhattan, the city government took ownership of an apartment building belonging to a guy named David Hess.

They used illegal power called eminent domain,

which allows governments to seize private property for public use.

In this case, they wanted to expand the subway system.

Hess fought them and lost.

And when it was all said and done, his building was torn down, and he was left with a triangle-shaped

piece of property.

And when Roman says triangle-shaped, he means means the property Hess was left with was about the size and shape of a very large slice of pizza.

He was not amused.

That's our producer Katie Mingle.

Later, the city tried to get him to donate his pizza-shaped property so they could build

a sidewalk.

He refused again.

They built a sidewalk anyway, and in the middle of the sidewalk is Hess's's triangle with a tile mosaic that reads

property of the Hesse state which has never been dedicated for public purposes.

In other words get get off my trangled jerks.

It's still there by the way, on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue in the West Village.

People like David Hess who refuse to sell their properties, are called holdouts.

An eminent domain only comes into play when the government wants your property for public use.

If it's a private development that wants your place and you refuse to sell, there's not much they can do.

Although there have been cases where eminent domain has been controversially used for private development, but that's another story.

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