Episode Title
The Duplex in Youngstown
Description
On the South Side of Youngstown, a modest duplex stood through the city’s long decline, dividing two lives with a single shared wall. Built to promise separation while enforcing proximity, it carried sound, heat, and presence — but never responsibility.
In the mid-nineteen seventies, a renter on one side of the duplex died quietly. No screams were heard. No alarm was raised. For days, life continued on the other side of the wall, televisions playing, routines intact, while a body lay unnoticed just inches away.
This episode examines how shared structures can normalize ambiguity — how thin walls blur accountability, how silence becomes tolerable, and how usefulness allows unresolved violence to fade without consequence. The duplex still stands on Youngstown’s South Side, indistinguishable from the others around it, continuing to divide lives exactly as it was designed to do.
Because sometimes it isn’t distance that hides a crime.
Sometimes it’s proximity without responsibility.
