Free Catherine Price by 101 Places Not to See Before You Die Page B

tortures detainees and indulges in other horrific abuse: one woman, a former beauty queen, was allegedly held for three days and repeatedly raped by eight policemen. And then there are the drug cartels themselves. Responsible for public assassinations, gruesome decapitations, and the murders of innocent citizens, they’re waging a bloody fight against one another and anyone who stands in their way.
    What’s particularly terrifying about this battle is that many of
Juárez’s victims have little or no connection to the battles raging around them. Innocent people have been shot in broad daylight; in the city of 1.6 million people, there were 17,000 car thefts and 1,650 carjackings in 2008 alone. The U.S. State Department warns that “recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades” and says that Juárez has become subject to “public shootouts during daylight hours in shopping centers and other public venues.” It recommends staying close to tourist sites, traveling only during the day, using toll roads wherever possible, avoiding ATMs, and, for women in particular, not traveling alone.
    The border is indeed exhilarating—but unfortunately for anyone trying to live or visit Ciudad Juárez, not in a good way.

Chapter 40 The World’s Skinniest Buildings
    S ome fights are hard to get worked up about—like the spat between the Sam Kee Building in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the so-called Skinny Building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over which structure is the thinnest.
    At four feet eleven inches at its base (and six feet on its second story, thanks to bay windows), the Sam Kee Building has been named the skinniest commercial building in the world by both the Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Like many other slender buildings, it was built partially out of spite: its lot, originally a normal size, got reduced by twenty-four feet when Vancouver expropriated the space to widen Pender Street in 1912. Designed in 1913, the building’s basement actually extends underneath the sidewalk and used to house the only public baths in Vancouver’s Chinatown (not to mention an escape tunnel for nearby opium dens); the upper two stories were devoted to shops and very narrow apartments.
    But watch out, Mr. Kee—Pittsburgh’s Skinny Building wants to challenge its claim to be the thinnest commercial space in the world. At five feet two inches wide from top to bottom, the Skinny Building is indeed more consistently emaciated than the top-heavy Sam Kee. What’s more, at three stories tall, it’s a floor higher. Back in the early 2000s, Pat Clark and Al Kovacik—a consultant and architect who were leasing the top two floors of the Skinny Building as an arts venue, sent photographs to Vancouver’s visitors’ center as proof that their building was narrower.
    Clark and Kovacik may have had a point, but unfortunately, their argument may now be moot—in 2007, their landlord refused to renew their lease, and the arts venue was forced to close. With that attraction gone, the building’s main draw is purely its diminutive size, which, as anyone who knows someone obsessed with their weight can attest, is really not that interesting.

Chapter 41 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
    A lso known as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge, swirling mass of plastic in the middle of the ocean that’s been estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
    The garbage patch—if one hundred million tons of debris can be called a patch—was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, oceanographer, and furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who decided to take a shortcut on his way back from a sailing competition in Hawaii. He and his crew sailed their fifty-foot catamaran through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre—an area usually avoided by sailors because of