Shoes on a Wire: Untangling an Urban Myth

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2015

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From teenage mischief to possible drug markets, a search for the real reasons sneakers end up on power lines.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When were the...
0:03.7	What school's...
0:06.0	Who decides what the next...
0:07.8	Where's that story?
0:09.2	Why they give the look?
0:11.2	What is this?
0:13.6	It's a curious city.
0:14.8	Where WBEZ answers your questions...
0:17.5	About Chicago, the region, and its people.
0:20.4	I'm Marrabenite, and I'm answering a question about a perplexing urban phenomenon,
0:25.5	Jim Shoes hanging from power lines.
0:28.8	Our question comes from Matt LaTurette.
0:31.2	He lives in Aurora, but grew up in Chicago's Belmont Central neighborhood,
0:34.8	and he always noticed the shoes dangling from above.
0:38.8	He wondered, who did that, and why?
0:42.3	There's always that mysterious group. It was always, you know, some mystery of, you know,
0:46.7	this group or them or they, whoever they are, you know.
0:50.3	This shoe hanging, clearly it happens, and the city of Chicago has data to prove it.
0:56.0	Over the past seven years, city workers received at least 6,000 requests to remove shoes
1:01.8	hanging from telephone or electrical wires, including a pair of cowboy boots and a rubber
1:06.8	ducky.
1:09.2	But getting to the bottom of Matt's question of why, that's difficult.
	...

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