What’s the large and ominous building in New York City with no windows or signs. It’s a skyscraper located at Church, Thomas, and Trimble streets. Is it a secret govt headquarters?
ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: This is called the AT&T Long Lines Building, at 33 Thomas St., designed by the firm John Carl Warnecke & Associates and completed in 1974. Like all traditional wireline telephone company buildings that house expensive switching equipment that needs to be protected from the elements or from foul play, it has few, if any, windows. Controlling the telephone service for Manhattan (and maybe much more) makes it a lot bigger than most such buildings. In Durham, such a switching equipment building (formerly GTE, later Verizon) is on Roxboro Rd. at Murray. You can find them in any town or city.
Two other older AT&T buildings in Manhattan are nearby: the aptly named “AT&T Building” at 32 Sixth Ave. and the “Western Union Building” at 60 Hudson St.
The Long Lines division of AT&T built and operated the interstate long distance network. See historical sites such as these (which focus o the post-WWII microwave system): http://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/longlines.html
http://www.drgibson.com/towers/
http://www.coldwarcomms.org/