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Spite may not be a productive impulse for emotional well-being, but it's been oddly productive in creating businesses, buildings, and even some new paint pigments. In this episode of The List Show, Erin shares 17 odd things done out of spite from Connie Mack's Spite Fence to the Ford GT40. In case you forgot, The List Show is a trivia-tastic, fact-filled show for curious people. Subscribe here for new Mental Floss episodes every Wednesday: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpZ5qUqpW4hW4zdfuBxMSJA?sub_confirmation=1 Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1 About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss 17 Outrageous Things Done Out of Spite | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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0:00
This little patch of sidewalk here in downtown New York City is a testament to the enduring power of spite
0:05
as it proudly declares it has never been dedicated for public purposes. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, and today's episode of The List Show is all about over-the-top things done just to send a message to an offending party
0:15
We're going to hit on the origin of the Hespite Triangle, the disturbingly literal origin of the phrase
0:20
cut up their nose to spite their faces, and the role that spite played in sports car history
0:25
To the studio! Back in 1913, New York's municipal government was seizing private properties as part of a
0:36
public works project to extend 7th Avenue. David Hess had owned property in the area
0:41
In the early 1920s, his estate received a tax bill for the remaining portion of the lot
0:45
a piece scarcely large enough for the erection of a slot machine. When the Hess estate realized
0:50
what they had, they leased it to the nearby cigar store. Eventually, they sold the triangle outright
0:54
but the message remains on the ground today, a not-so-towering monument to the power of pettiness
1:00
The OG of spite idioms refers to those who would cut off their noses to spite their faces
1:04
It's the proverbial example of doing something—even something that clearly inflicts harm on oneself—to
1:10
screw over someone else. According to a chronicler from the 13th century
1:13
there's a real-life story that could have plausibly given rise to the familiar expression
1:17
When they heard that Vikings were approaching their monastery in Scotland, a group of 9th century nuns apparently took matters into their own hands—and faces
1:24
The nun's abbess, Abby the Younger, evidently told the women to cut off their noses and upper
1:29
lips as a means of self-defense. It followed a logical, if disturbing, line of thinking
1:34
The self-inflicted injuries were meant to dissuade the invaders from raping the women. If that was the plan, you'd have to call the results mixed. Though the Vikings evidently
1:41
did not sexually assault the nuns, they did burn down the monastery with the women inside
1:47
Let's cleanse the palate with a spiteful story with considerably lower stakes
1:51
After a company called Surrey Nanosystems developed Vantablack, one of the darkest
1:55
materials ever created, they licensed it to the British Indian artist Anish Kapoor, meaning he was
2:00
the only one who could legally use the pigment. Annoyed with this particular bit of art world
2:04
exclusivity, Stuart Semple, a British artist a couple of decades younger than Kapoor, created a
2:09
color he described as the pinkest pink and arranged it so that anyone trying to purchase his very pink
2:14
pink had to attest that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor
2:20
you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor
2:24
Even that wasn't enough for Semple, especially once Kapoor managed to get his hands on the pink
2:29
pigment and posted a very pink middle finger on Instagram. Semple helped create Black 3.0
2:35
an extremely black acrylic paint that he says is equivalent to Vantablack
2:39
as far as the human eye can see. In what I'm going to call a fitting end to this colorful saga
2:44
MIT engineers created a substance in 2019 that is even blacker than Black 3 and Vantablack Your move paint dweebs Etzogunara Germany isn a particularly large town So how did it end up the home of two sporting
2:56
goods companies, Adidas and Puma? Spite, baby! Adolf and Rudolf Dazlow were brothers with an
3:02
apparently successful company on their hands in 1936. Athletes wearing their sneakers won a total
3:06
of seven gold medals at that year's Olympic Games. A little more than a decade later, though, the
3:10
company split up. Rudolf helmed Puma while Adolf created Adidas. Not an acronym for All Day I Dream
3:17
About Soccer, as you might have heard. It was just a portmanteau of his first and last names
3:21
The brothers reportedly never spoke again after their falling out, which might help explain why
3:25
we never got a good explanation for the sneaker beef. Wait a minute, brilliant business idea
3:31
No, never mind. Spite may have gifted the world an extra sneaker brand, but it also stole from us
3:36
us at least one lovely font. For a while, anyway. At the turn of the 20th century, a company called
3:41
Dove's Press was founded by Thomas Cobden Sanderson and Emery Walker. The men found some success in
3:46
business together, but in less than a decade, their relationship hit the rocks. When they divided up
3:51
assets, Cobden Sanderson was granted the use of the Dove's Press type, a serif typeface that was
3:55
considered elegant and distinctive. The deal said that after Cobden Sanderson's death, the rights to
4:00
typeface would go to Walker, but that never happened. Cobden Sanderson took matters into
4:05
his own hands, towards the end of his life. In around 170 trips over the course of several months
4:10
he managed to dump around 2,600 pounds of mechanical presses into the Thames River
4:14
in an effort to guarantee that his beloved typeface would not outlive him
4:18
It was said that Cobden Sanderson's motivations may have been snobbish, as well as spiteful. He
4:23
apparently didn't want Walker to use their once conjointly owned typeface on inferior products
4:27
In 2014, divers were able to recover about 150 artifacts from the river, though
4:32
preserving some of the history of this particular moment in typography triviality
4:36
Whether the divers were inspired by Spite remains unknown. Copton Sanderson may have been a small man when it comes to matters of typographic legacy, but
4:44
he's got nothing on the Brucken Mansion, or Little Bridge Man. This particular bit of Spite
4:48
took the form of a sculpture attached to a bridge over the Rhine River in Germany. The bridge connected
4:53
Bonn and Buell, and was the source of some conflict between the two villages in the late
4:57
19th century. When the construction project was finally done, it included a small statue
5:02
the Little Bridge Man, defiantly sticking his little bridge butt in the direction of Buell
5:06
Points to Bonn, perhaps? But when life handed Buell a Little Bridge Man, they made Little Bridge
5:11
Lemonade, or something. They embraced the tiny guy, putting him on everything from postcards to
5:16
banknotes. The bridge was destroyed during World War II, but the Brouken Mansion was recovered
5:21
and affixed to a new bridge. In 1960, he was finally destroyed in a senseless act of butt-busting
5:26
vandalism. But today, a replica proudly stands on Germany's Kennedy Bridge. Don't mess with a redneck who has a backhoe. These words, offered up by farmer Rhett Davis
5:35
might have been good advice for his neighbors in Hooper Utah After a dispute that centered on the apparent smelliness of Davis property the two parties reached an impasse Davis was willing to pay for half of a fence while his neighbors were not In response the longtime Hooper resident erected what he called
5:51
Redneck Stonehenge, popping three junked cars nose-first into the dirt near the dividing line
5:56
of the two properties. To Davis' credit, he did say that he would remove the offending fence if
6:01
anyone complained. As he said, I made my point. I'm an easygoing guy. I'll take them down.
6:07
A slightly more traditional fence was built for reasons of spiteful commerce in the mid-1930s
6:11
Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics played at Scheib Park. Fans had to pay to attend games
6:16
of course, but plenty of spectators could get around ticket fees by watching games from nearby
6:20
homes. Second-story windows and makeshift bleachers built on rooftops provided a good
6:24
view of the action down below. Some people even charged admission to their unofficial extra seats
6:29
outside the stadium. By opening day of 1935, the team had evidently had enough. The field's
6:34
outfield fence was dramatically razed to block the view of freeloading spectators, and, perhaps
6:39
more to the point, to cut out the team's de facto competition for prime baseball-watching
6:43
real estate. Though the new structure was dubbed Connie Mack's Spite Fence, the real
6:47
mastermind behind the change was the team's owner, Jack Scheib. The Spite Fence ultimately
6:51
failed to turn the team's fortunes around, though. By the mid-1950s, they relocated to
6:55
Kansas City. Today, the Athletics, often referred to as the A's, play their home games in Oakland
7:01
If you take a visit to the Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, you'll probably notice a grave that
7:05
doesn't quite fit in with the rest. It commemorates Mary Moriarty, and it's really a monument to her
7:10
husband Daniel's ability to hold a grudge. Though Daniel was a successful businessman who made a
7:14
pretty penny in the real estate game, he felt that his new money status prevented him from
7:19
gaining the social status he deserved, a grievance that you and all your millionaire friends can no
7:23
doubt relate to. When forced to choose a permanent resting place for his beloved wife, Moriarty took
7:28
the opportunity to stunt on his haters. He erected a massive 80-foot grave marker that took almost 20
7:33
years to complete. The inordinate height of the grave may have been conceived as an opportunity
7:37
for his late wife to metaphorically look down on the couple's critics. Classy. There are enough
7:42
spite houses out there to build a whole spite village, and after you hear some of these stories
7:47
you may wish that their creators could be forced to coexist with one another. Let's start with Dr
7:51
John Tyler, who lived in Frederick, Maryland back in the early 1800s. City officials had planned to
7:56
build a road right through Tyler's land. Rather than let that come to pass, Tyler did what any
8:01
spiteful homeowner would. He dug into the legal code and discovered a law prohibiting road
8:05
construction that would go through existing buildings. He quickly got a builder to start construction on a structure right where the proposed road would come through. When officials
8:13
saw what had happened, they were forced to abandon their plans, a victim to close reading
8:17
and an absolute dearth of civic-mindedness on Tyler's part. Alaba Asa, AKA The Grudge, is a narrow ode to narrow-mindedness. The Beirut building is just
8:26
13 feet at its widest and 2 feet wide at its narrowest It seems to have been built primarily to block the view of a neighboring property a property belonging to the owner of the Grudge brother Cambridge Massachusetts is home to some of the United States most prestigious universities
8:41
but that didn't stop Francis O'Reilly from doing something pretty stupid. In 1908, O'Reilly wanted
8:45
his neighbor to buy an eight-foot-wide parcel of land. When he was rebuffed, he responded by
8:50
building a spite house on the property. Today, the oddly shaped building is home to Annie Hall
8:53
Interiors, a local interior design firm. About a century earlier, Captain Avery Brown built a home
8:58
in Mystic, Connecticut. Brown had a nice view of the nearby river—until one John Fellows got
9:04
involved, at least. Fellows, for evidently spiteful reasons that remain unclear, built a giant home
9:10
directly blocking Brown's view of the water. Instead of a whole spite house, sometimes all
9:14
you need is a little resentment in your heart and one spite wall. Ireland's Jealous Wall is one such
9:19
structure. It looks like the partial remnants of an ancient building, but it's accurately been
9:23
labeled a sham ruin. Sibling rivalry was at the heart of its construction. Robert Roquefort built
9:28
it, supposedly to block the view of his brother's more ornate home next door. I guess Robert succeeded
9:32
in obscuring his own view of his brother's good fortune, but in doing so, he forced himself to
9:37
look at an odd fake ruin. Mission accomplished? Before he became sports car royalty, Ferruccio
9:44
Lamborghini was a tractor manufacturer and generally happy Ferrari owner. At one point
9:48
the clutch on his car wasn't working properly, leading the tractor man to approach Enzo Ferrari
9:53
There's some disagreement over the exact sequence of events, but eventually Lamborghini
9:57
became incensed enough at his countryman that he vowed to build a superior car
10:01
He enlisted the help of five former Ferrari employees, and eventually did release a series
10:06
of celebrated luxury cars to rival Ferrari. Around the same time, Enzo got into another spat that helped give birth to a competitor
10:13
When Henry Ford II wanted his company to get into the racing game, he approached Ferrari
10:17
with an offer to buy a controlling stake in the Italian company. Ferrari initially agreed to the deal, but eventually pulled out, enraging Ford. In response
10:25
the American ordered his company to build a car that could beat the Ferrari at France's
10:28
famed 24 Hours of Le Mans race. That challenge turned into the Ford GT40. By 1966, the car
10:35
successfully knocked Ferrari off its perch as the champion of Le Mans. All this spite, productive
10:40
and otherwise, has left a bad taste in my mouth. So let's end with one story of spite overcome
10:45
The story of Connecticut's Collinsville Spite House from the 1800s follows the familiar contours
10:50
of many of the items on this list. A property owner with plenty of extra money and ill will
10:54
builds a structure to stick their thumb in their neighbor's collective eye. In this case, the property owner was a butcher, and his chosen medium was a narrow building with
11:01
Venetian blinds blocking the windows. This spiteful saga does have a bit of a happy ending, though. When the man's son inherited
11:07
the property, he promptly tore it down in a gesture of goodwill. Leave it to the son of
11:11
a butcher to know when to squash some beef. We've got an upcoming episode about the Animals of Chernobyl. If you know any fun facts about
11:18
these radioactive critters, drop it in the comments for a chance to be featured in that episode
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