Builder Beware

with things being good enough. But not Amo Koivunen. He went above and beyond what most people accomplished, but nobody hated him for it. They loved him. He was a hero. Koivunen was born in Finland in nineteen seventeen, eventually joining the military to fight the Soviet Union. Thirty years later, in nineteen thirty nine, the Soviets invaded Finland in what

was called the Winter War. After a year of fighting followed by the signing of a peace treaty between the two sides, the Soviets had taken eleven percent of the country for itself. Finished, soldiers saw a chance to get their territory back The following year, as Hitler's German soldiers moved in, they joined forces with the Nazis. Though they wanted no part in the Holocaust. All they wanted was

their land back. Unfortunately, even with the Germans behind them, the Finns weren't strong enough to fend off the Soviets. The Nazis retreated and Finland was left to face the Red Army on its own. Most soldiers saw the writing on the wall. There was no way they would survive another war against the Soviet Union, but some men pressed on despite the odds. One such soldier was twenty seven year old Amo Koivunen. A March eighteenth of nineteen forty four,

Koivunen was making some for his units. He and his men had settled in for a cup to warm themselves amid the freezing winter air when gunshots rang out around them. Koivunen, who had been placed on ski patrol that day, sped away from the Soviet incursion. Gaining on his tail, he skied for hours, keeping his distance until he could find safer ground, but they kept coming. Luckily, he had a secret weapon in his pockets. It was a little pill called pervtten German soldiers were known to take it for

an energy boost to keep fighting. There were downsides, however, those who took the drug off and experienced wild hallucinations. Some even died from the side effects. Pervten was less like adrenaline and more like a primitive version of crystal meth. Kai Unan hesitated. He had never taken this stuff before, but as enemy soldiers encroached on his position, he was left with fewer options for survival. Someone called out for

him to keep going. Don't slow down, they said, so he shoved his mittened hand into his pocket and pulled out the bottle. He couldn't grab us a single pill with his hand restricted by his mitten, so he dumped the bottle out into his palm and swallowed everything that fell out, thirty pills. The effects were almost immediate. He raced ahead, his exhaustion a thing of the past. Koivunen

had never felt better. In fact, he was so hopped up on pervidden that he didn't notice the Russians shooting at him as he skied past them in the wrong direction. He also didn't notice the landmine that blew him off his skis and obliterated his foot With the pervodden still racing through him. He crawled over two feet to a ditch,

where he waited for backup, but it never came. Koivunen expected that he would die from many number of things, the plummeting temperatures, his gaping wounds, or from the lethal dose of pervdten raging through his system. He spent nearly a week in that dugout, subsisting on pine nuts and a bird that he caught, which he ate raw. Days later, he pulled himself out of the ditch and set off

on foot, with no idea where he was going. Two hundred and fifty miles later, he stumbled into a finished hospital, which took him in and assessed his condition. He had lost considerable weight and his heart was still racing, but he'd made it. Amo koi Vennon had ingested thirty times the recommended dose of a dangerous drug, escaped Soviet soldiers on skis, survived a landmine explosion, spent a week in a ditch in the freezing cold, and then walked two

fifty miles to reach safety. By all measures, he shouldn't have survived at all, but Amo koi Vennon lived to be seventy two years old. I guess what didn't kill him only made him stronger. In New York City, you don't build out, you build up. Real estate is at such a premium. On the small island, stores tend to be not much larger than shoe boxes. Office buildings, on the their hand, source so high they can pierce the clouds no matter the size. Though one thing is certain,

New York is always changing. Old buildings are torn down to make way for new ones, while mom and pop stores of days gone by become the chain coffee shops of today. For example, the historic Pennsylvania Station, which had been the boa arts fixture of Midtown Manhattan since nineteen ten, was demolished in nineteen sixty six so a newer, more cost efficient train station could be built in its place. A window into the past was shattered the day the old penn Station came down, a sign of progress and

its costs. But New York City was changing even before that. Back in nineteen ten, buildings that had lined the streets of Granwich Village for years suddenly found themselves on the chopping block. The reason the city had become too crowded. It's narrow streets needed to be widened to accommodate a new subway line being built underneath. Properties spanning eleven blocks were slated for demolition, including storefronts, homes, and a five

story apartment building called the Vorhees. The Vorhees lived at seventh Avenue in Christopher Street and had been owned by a Philadelphia landlord named David Hess. Hess's estate resented that the city was trying to do this, and they weren't the only ones. Landowners from all over New York fought tooth and nail to keep their buildings intact. Petitions were signed, lawsuits were filed, but the city officials declared eminent domain

and the fight was over. If New York wanted to use the land for public projects, then it was well within their rights to do so. The land across those seven blocks was surveyed just before the buildings came down, with every square inch tallied up as part of the city's total. Well almost every square inch. Apparently the land surveyors had missed a small amount of Hess's property in their survey. The Vorhees apartment building was still demolished, but

Hess's estate was entitled to the land. It's still owned, so the city asked them if they would be kind enough to donate that land so as not to break up the work already underway. Hessa's airs, bitter about how they'd been treated, said no. If New York wanted its new subway line, it was going to have to build it around a Lot fifty five, the remaining parcel of land it did not own, which it did. The Seventh Avenue subway line was eventually finished, despite the Hess's ownership

of Lot fifty five. In the late nineteen thirties, after the estate had grown tired of paying taxes on such a tiny sliver of land, the property was sold for one thousand dollars to Village Cigars, owners of Lot fifty four next door. It was a paltry sum for a prime slice of New York real estate even then. Today, Village Cigars still occupies the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street, and the memory of the hess battle with the city lives on thanks to the small commemorative plaque

on the sidewalk outside. It reads property of the Hess Estate, which has never been dedicated for public purposes. Village Cigars is not the smallest free standing in building in New York. No, that honor belongs to the square foot Greenwich Locksmith's a few blocks away, which can only accommodate one or two people inside at a time. However, the former Hess property is still technically the smallest piece of private land in

the city, at only inches around. To see it's all one has to do is walk to the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Streets in Greenwich Village and look down at the triangular plaque. And that's it. The plaque covers the entire property. That little active defiance marks what remains of the hessa State's former New York fuip print. You might not be able to build a house on it, but you can certainly admire what it represents. Ines of stubbornness from one New York City family that refused to

be bullied around. Now that's what i'd call curious. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities, so suscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the

World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,