When Windows Were Wires: the Projection of Network Invulnerability and the Architecture of the AT&T Long Lines

Telephone exchange at 33 Thomas Street, New York. Photograph by the author, 2013.

34 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00184

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 When Windows Were Wires: The Projection of Network Invulnerability and the Architecture of the AT&T Long Lines

ADDISON GODEL

Since at least Leon Battista Alberti, architects have recognized the window as a fundamental element bridging interior and exterior, providing ventilation, light, and “a free Sight of the Sky.” 1 Twentieth- century modernism sought to complete this communication by expanding the window, ultimately to fill the building’s outer surface. By midcentury, however, a constellation of institutional, social, and technical forces seemed to reverse this transformation, yielding an architecture that could satisfy its communicative needs without visible openings. The tempting popular stylistic label of “brutalism” insufficiently grasps the complexity of the window’s reinvention in a building like the former AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street in New York. Built from 1967 to 1974, it rises to 532 feet without one recognizable window. Save for entrance doors, basement vehicle ramp, and thirty-six large mechanical grilles in two belts, its opaque granite-on-concrete surface eschews conventional architectural openings entirely. While New York boasts many windowless telephone exchanges, electrical substations, transit venting buildings, and parking garages, few approach the scale of this “world’s tallest blank wall,” as it was deemed by mid - century sociologist William Whyte. 2 The building’s curious or even hostile appearance, like that of many others built by American Telephone and Telegraph in the 1960s and 1970s, is often explained, in a Cold War fable, as a defense of important telephone equipment against nuclear attack. Yet the corporation and its architects evidently viewed 33 Thomas as a sculptural, humanizing work of civic-minded architecture addressed to skyline and street. These overlapping, unsatisfying descriptions participate in a discursive condition centered around the reinvention of windows as wires . A full understanding of this transformation requires articulating the multiple roles played by such a building—as a keystone in a vast technical network, a con - tested meeting point between that network and its labor force,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 and a rhetorical figure within a military-industrial imaginarium of danger—in their irreducibly material realities and their seemingly immaterial effects. Doing so will also reveal the ways in which AT&T’s attempts to seal its bunker-like installations against ever- multiplying projections of vulnerability differed profoundly from others developed in the same period. 3

1. The Company Per its municipal certificate of occupancy, 33 Thomas contains twenty-nine floors (each around eighteen feet high, not counting three cellar levels), and nearly every floor contains “telephone exchange, equipment and offices.” 4 The tenth and topmost floors house mechanical equipment, vented by the exterior grilles. The ground floor adds a lounge, cafeteria, offices, and storage, and the cellars accommodate a few other support spaces. These labels, however, obscure 33 Thomas’s peculiar density , suggested by the occupancy and loading limits for which the city certified the build - ing. A typical office tower of similar date and size, 111 Wall Street, can legally accommodate 300 or more persons on most of its floors, with typical allowable live loads of 125 pounds per square foot (psf). Its mechanical floor, however, is packed full of heavy equip - ment, with maximum loads ranging from 200 to 400 psf, and per - mits only three persons. 5 This exceptional condition is the norm at 33 Thomas; ten of its above-ground stories can legally hold fewer than ten persons each, and most of these have areas permitting live loads of 300 psf or more. Even some of the “lighter” floors (100–200 psf) admit only five human bodies. This is a heavy building, and even where it is not heavy, it is full —so full that a whole floor holds fewer people than the average elevator. The building may well be the densest inhabitable object in New York City. To understand how it got that way, we must first know something about the company that commissioned it. For most of the twentieth century, AT&T possessed a legal, closely regulated and nearly complete monopoly—the Bell System— on electronic communications in the United States. The corpora - tion controlled an enormous research enterprise (Bell Laboratories), a similarly vast manufacturing arm (Western Electric), and most of the nation’s local phone service companies. These last were linked together by the Long Lines Division, which enabled long-distance calls throughout the United States and later overseas. AT&T’s monopolistic status was effectively ratified by the federal govern - ment through the peaceable resolution of antitrust cases in 1913 and 1956. Both cases turned on the idea that a single phone com - pany could provide a public good–universal, reliable phone ser - vice–that the competitive market could not. The Long Lines had been essential to such claims since the 1890s,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 when, with the expiration of its original patents, Bell pursued market dominance by creating and acquiring local operating com - panies. Bell argued that for those exchanges to form a national net - work, they would need a common operator ensuring standardized equipment and reliable operation. Since long distance was rarely used, the company’s construction of new lines, promoted with high-profile “first calls,” also suggested its sacrifice of profits to ser - vice and technical progress. Building the first transcontinental line required erecting 130,000 phone poles to support 14,000 miles of wire, all for an unappealing service that cost a minimum of twenty dollars for calls that could take as many minutes to connect. The lines also hedged against the growth of competing phone compa - nies, but more important was the chance to point out to the press, as the company’s president did, that the service would not be “com - mercially practicable” for years to come. 6 After World War II, AT&T sought additional justification through its role as an integral participant in the military-industrial complex. AT&T leased or built lines for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, the Automatic Voice Network, and the Office of Civil Defense. In 1949, just as the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Bell, Western Electric became the managing entity of the Department of Defense’s chief nuclear weapons laboratory. In private correspondence, AT&T’s president suggested to the govern - ment that the suit contradicted the service that AT&T’s combined manufacturing, research, and transnational operations arms offered the military. In the out-of-court resolution in 1956, the Eisenhower administration reaffirmed the monopoly on the condition that AT&T confine its business solely to telephony—and matters of national security. 7 Even in the monopoly’s last days in the early 1980s, as authorities debated whether nuclear responsiveness would be aided or hindered by competitive telephony, the company asserted that divestiture would doom the “essential system plan - ning and engineering” needed for defense. 8 Over the same period, long-distance toll service grew more pop - ular, and its financial equations reversed. Local service required complex wiring and intensive labor, but government regulators sought to keep their constituents’ monthly local bills low. AT&T would subsidize the local costs out of the growing Long Lines income. Long-distance service had quietly become the financial infrastructure supporting the Bell System. 9 Thus, any competition in long-distance service constituted an existential threat, and pro - tecting the company meant protecting this network—physically, legally, and rhetorically. For example, in the 1948–1956 battle over the off-brand Hush-A- Phone—a Bakelite accessory that fit over the mouthpiece to muffle private conversations—AT&T claimed that “hushed” voices were

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 Grant Wright. Sectional view of a telephone building, ca. 1900. From Henry Chase Hill, The Wonder Book of Knowledge: The Marvels of Modern Industry and Invention, the Interesting Stories of Common Things, the Mysterious Processes of Nature harmful insofar as they amounted to a lowered transmission quality. Simply Explained (1921). AT&T’s loss in this case precipitated the 1965–1968 Carterfone case, in which AT&T alleged that a device negotiating between two- way radios and telephones endangered the company’s reputation, since the Carterfone’s performance could not be guaranteed . The notion that such devices were in some way “harmful” to the network was not effective, and AT&T lost again. The company’s petti ness revealed real dangers—not to its equipment but to the regulatory framework in which it was suspended. In the early 1960s, coincident with the first large windowless exchanges, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began to permit competitors such as MCI to enter the market for long-distance microwave-transmitted “private lines,” connecting, for example, a corporation’s offices in different cities. AT&T perceived this as “cream-skimming”—MCI could reap the high price of long distance in the regulated market, while AT&T would be stuck maintaining costly urban and rural wiring. 10 Regulators would not permit AT&T to raise local rates, and lowering long-distance rates to defeat MCI would have appeared anticompetitive. In 1973, the head of Long Lines asserted to the government that MCI posed “an immediate threat to all service.” 11 This seemingly hysterical corporate vision would ultimately prove correct: without the monopoly, service could not be guaranteed; and without guar - anteed service, the monopoly could not be justified. AT&T’s post - war building campaigns, and the rhetoric surrounding them, can be understood only in the light of the looming dangers posed by potential competitors and federal regulators.

2. The Switch Universal telephony was achieved through particular technologies and techniques, through which AT&T sought to meet or produce enormous demand, especially for profitable services like long dis - tance. Aggressive technical improvement also operated politically to control AT&T’s workforce and to justify the monopoly to cus - tomers and Cold War policy makers. In turn, switches and trans - mission media demonstrate how the material facts of telephone technology complicated the company’s representational agenda. Taken together, these accounts establish not only the state of the network at the time of 33 Thomas’s construction but the various roles such a building would have been expected to fill. Telephone switching is the task of creating a voice circuit between telephones and enabling multiple calls to share one trans - mission medium. In Bell’s system, local lines ran to central switch - ing offices, connected to each other by trunk lines. Voice or electronic communiqués between offices coordinated the correct wiring of calls. 12 For decades, the human “cord board” operator was

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 essential to this process, and early exchange buildings contained dining and sitting rooms, lecture halls, and studies intended to cul - tivate the “girls” that made up most of the enormous workforce. Electromechanical switching, invented in the 1890s, used magnets, motors, and a lattice of contacts to approximate these workers’ movements—and potentially to handle much higher volumes of calls. Bell’s managers effectively ignored the technology until the 1920s, when they began aggressively phasing it in, partially in response to militant WWI-era labor activity. By 1956, nearly 90 per - cent of customers could dial local calls without an operator. 13 Meanwhile, Bell Labs was developing the Electronic Switching System (ESS), consisting of grids of ferrous “reeds” in glass envelopes, manipulated by computer-controlled magnetic plates. The first ESS was put into service in 1965. Ten years later, 175 ESS offices—including 33 Thomas—served millions of customers. Increasingly, operators existed to provide customer service and to handle types of calls for which billing or connection had not yet been automated. Most were replaced by vast ESS banks and the much smaller contingent of technically skilled, largely male workers who designed, programmed, manufactured, installed, and main -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 tained them. A small ESS station might require only one or two on-site technicians. 14 High-capacity switches also permit consoli - dating smaller offices into large installations, another way of shrink - ing the company’s urban labor force. The remaining operators faced poor job security, a demanding work schedule, and discriminatory practices. Their dissatisfaction undermined the service standards that ostensibly motivated automation. In the early 1970s, half of New York’s repairpersons quit in their first two years, and half the operators quit every year (though separating these numbers from larger workforce reductions is difficult). 15 Nonetheless, the windowless buildings were not built solely as containers for automated equipment. The building at 33 Thomas was originally planned for “1,925 maintenance and operating per - sonnel,” presumably working in shifts. As built, it could handle a legal maximum of 1,459 persons, making it far less populous than most buildings its size, but hardly empty, even if occupancy never approached these limits. The similarly windowless, pre-ESS facility at 811 Tenth Avenue was built for 3,000 operators. 16 Constructing the systems also involved enormous quantities of human labor, as seen in a 1976 AT&T film documenting the instal - lation of a four-story ESS at the World Trade Center. Conspicuously diverse workers bolt down heavy frames, pull “six hundred miles of cable” through frames, and solder “three million connections,” yielding a “supercomputer”-like apparatus. If AT&T could not elimi -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 nate these jobs, it would use them to demonstrate the scope and dif - ficulty of its achievements. As a switching office, 33 Thomas is not unique, though it was expected to be the largest automated call-switching center in the world. In windowless - ness, it was preceded by 811 Tenth Avenue (completed in 1964) and was contemporary with 375 Pearl Street. Similarly opaque low-rise facilities were also completed in Williamsburg Opposite: Number One and Rego Park circa 1976. These high-visibility exchanges were Electronic Switching System only four of the dozens of New York City properties shared between (1ESS), Succasunna, NJ, 1965. Long Lines and the local operating company, New York Telephone Courtesy AT&T Archives and 17 History Center. (NYT)—“the state’s largest tenant” in the 1970s. Not all of this Above: Diagrammatic section space was devoted to telephone exchanges, but clearly much of a showing typical exchange large city’s physical footprint is taken up by switches and wires. construction, 1975. From In design terms, while telephone exchanges have gained and Roger Rodriguez and Elmer F. Chapman, “Communications shed functions since the first dedicated buildings were put up in Disaster at ‘Ma Bell’s’: The the 1890s, certain things seem to have remained constant. Essentially, Night All the Phones Were such buildings negotiate between the switching apparatus and a Busy,” WNYF , no. 3 (1975). Courtesy WNYF . massive quantity of wiring that passes through the site under - ground. They tend to be tall, with deep floor plates, reflecting certain benefits to adjacency of equipment banks. 18 Typically, a basement “cable vault” opens around hundreds of trunk-line cables, organized into parallel aisles. As the cables themselves block lateral movement, vault access may involve ladders and a subbasement or crawl space. “Tip cables” run vertically from the trunk lines, through a long, narrow slot in the ceiling (one reported case was six inches wide by 265 feet long), to the ground floor’s main distribution frame, an array of circuit breakers and fuses that isolates each connection from surges. More cables rise from the frame through holes in the ceiling (ranging in area from two to fif - teen square feet) and through wall ducts to the switches, which in the electromechanical era would be organized in sixteen-foot-high frames, separated by spaces as narrow as two feet wide. 19 This typology—a dense prism of telephone frames, stacked ver - tically over a cable vault—was finalized in the electromechanical era, and the windowless buildings largely retained it. They are con - siderably heavier (the 1920s exchange at 204 Second Avenue has a maximum live load of only 150 psf), likely thanks to the increased ceiling heights (increased from a range of 13.5–16.5 feet to one of 17.5–18.5 feet), which permit greater densities of equipment. The

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 most significant change is that which renders the buildings windowless: the vertical cable runs are moved to the outer walls, passing through hollow concrete blocks that are in turn surrounded by unseen terra-cotta tiles. 20 This choice likely streamlined interior planning. Since tall, heavy buildings must sacrifice considerable floor space to vertical structure, planning around the cableways was likely a nuisance. Perimeter connections might also have reduced the need for hori - zontal wiring. Windowlessness thus embodies the desire to maxi - mize floor area, unchecked by demands for light and view. Other explanations for windowlessness may simply be alibis for the pri - oritization of equipment over its operators—already apparent dur - ing the Great Depression, when some exchanges operated on hot days with windows closed and the heat on, so as to spare the machines from humidity. 21 This concern for “delicate” equipment, sensitive to temperature and dust, was offered by AT&T architects as one explanation for windowlessness, sometimes in tandem with claims about nuclear fallout. 22 But glass is not a dust-transmitting medium, and sunlight could have been shielded by established architectural devices such as integral brise-soleils or the aluminum louvers that the architects of 33 Thomas had recently used to grant an electronics factory “100 percent shading of direct solar rays” while “still retain[ing] maximum visibility for outside views.” 23 The mechanical system of 33 Thomas was even designed to capture and make use of the heat generated by the equipment. Something similar likely could have been applied to solar gain. 24 In fact, the customers posed a more serious threat than the sun, as too many simultaneous calls could exceed even the ESS’s capac - ity. New York’s call volume was rising in the 1960s—telephone his - tories cite a decision permitting the use of welfare payments for phone service, a major increase in stock trading, and the replace - ment of visits by phone calls due to fears of street crime. Almost 200,000 New York City phones went into service in 1968, an increase of nearly 25 percent over the previous year’s additions. New facilities like 33 Thomas were one way to address this boom, but with charges kept low, service standards kept high, and a number of overlapping building campaigns in progress, lower-profile net - work improvements were proving difficult to fund. 25 The years 1969 and 1970 thus saw disastrous telephone outages in, among other cities, Boston, Denver, Houston, and New York. Unlike the gradual outages experienced with electromechanical systems, an overloaded ESS would fail suddenly and totally, producing, in New York, [a] kind of surrealistic telephone chaos. . . . People would pick up their telephones and hear several strangers talking among

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 themselves—first shouting, “Get off my line!” and finally, in despair, laughing and engaging in get- acquainted conversations. Subscribers Wall detail of 33 Thomas Street, who had made only local calls would find on their monthly New York. From “Designed for bills that they had been charged for calls to San Francisco or Machines but Mindful of People,” Honolulu. 26 Architectural Record 146 (July 1969). Courtesy Alice Warnecke. For several weeks, more than ten thousand phones were out of service for most of each day. The outage was a public relations dis - aster for a company facing emergent competition and seeking to convince the public that only its “natural monopoly” could ade - quately meet service demands. A postdivestiture outage at 33 Thomas, on September 17, 1991— well-documented by congressional investigation—bears close examination, as it hints at the building’s internal function, although by this point the facility, armed with three fourth-generation ESS complexes, was operating with a smaller day staff of “approxi - mately 116 technical and supervisory people, plus clerical support people.” 27 Several hundred fiber-optic T-3 lines (supplying roughly 400,000 voice-grade circuits) passed through or terminated in the building. The building was also a “focal point” serving the World Trade Center, World Financial Center, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which leased lines connecting the nearby airports to its Long Island control center. The outage lasted several hours, with over five million calls blocked (including repeated attempts). While the business community was partly spared by the lateness of the hour, banks had difficulty finalizing their day’s transactions and had to remain open until service was restored. The New York Mercantile Exchange, the Commodity Exchange, and NASDAQ were all affected, with the last experiencing outages on 15 percent of its terminals. The Financial Instrument Exchange transacted only one-fifth of its normal business. The FAA lost most of its radar, radio, telephone, and computer links, effectively clos - ing the region’s three airports for six hours, with consequences for 85,000 passengers on 1,174 flights. Take-offs for New York were halted or diverted, and planes in the air were guided down on non - standard frequencies. The outage was triggered by a series of overlapping errors, com - pared by one congressional witness to those that produced the Chernobyl disaster. 28 Early in the morning, power utility Con Edison requested that 33 Thomas shift to its own generators in anticipation of heavy public loads. Previous “cut-overs” to the base - ment’s “train-engine sized” diesels had gone smoothly, but in this case a safety device misinterpreted a normal voltage spike as a power surge and triggered the shutdown of the five twentieth-floor

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 Architectural section of 33 Thomas Street, New York. From “Designed for Machines but Mindful of People,” Architectural Record 146 (July 1969). Courtesy Alice Warnecke.

AC-to-DC rectifiers—leaving the telephone equipment running on emergency battery power. Discovery of the error was hindered by miscommunications between the separate AC and DC staffs, poor alarm design, and, most crucially, the building’s densely equipped, multistory configuration. The alarms on the twentieth floor (maxi - mum occupancy: seven) went unnoticed, as did others orphaned by changed interior layouts. Some suffered from burnt-out bulbs, damaged wires, and bells screwed down during a recent testing period by annoyed employees. Because they could be reached only by ladder (due to the high ceilings), they had been left this way and produced only a “muted clacking.” 29 Only well into the afternoon, as the batteries ran low, did an employee notice an alarm light in the fifteenth-floor locker room. Restored commercial power was unable to reach the equipment with the rectifiers deactivated, and by 4:40 p.m., “major components of the transmission system began to go down” as staff began extracting and resetting 124 soda-can-size fuses. To restart the rec - tifiers, they employed “a six-foot two-by-four board,” braced against a wall and used as a lever to press the AC-DC relays closed. However, “[w]hen the technique was attempted on Rectifier #3, smoke and noise came from the rectifier, and the attempt was abandoned.” Only at 6:50 p.m. , with the batteries recharging, could staff com - mence reactivating the telephone equipment itself. 30 Seen through the events of the outage, 33 Thomas is neither an inert granite block nor a computer facilitating seamless computa - tion but rather a phone-call factory filled with aging and tempera - mental machinery demanding close attention from its skeleton crew. Telephony runs on diesel fuel and spare lengths of wood, as ad-hoc repairs and quasi-sabotage muffle alarms linked vaguely to other machines hidden in the depths. As Representative Wilbert Tauzin noted, We are talking about a relay burning out because of a power shortage, and the warning systems not going off, and people not even being around to hear them if they went off. . . . That’s the kind of technology we are talking about—broom handles and two-by-fours. You know, maybe we will go back to string with wax on it and cans. 31

3. Wires under Fire Though more advanced than “string with wax on it,” AT&T’s lines of transmission, like the switches in which they terminated, remained irreducibly tied to materiality and labor. By the 1960s, most calls were transmitted over earthbound cable or wireless microwave transmission via terrestrial stations and orbital satel - lites. While the latter limited the need for cable and rights-of-way,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 they still required infrastructure. Microwave transmis - sions are limited by lines of sight, so ground stations must be built roughly every twenty-six miles to keep the signal from striking hills or escaping into outer space due to the earth’s curvature. 32 Orbital satellite calls were first tested in 1960, but the long transmissions intro - duced annoying delays, and since satellite dishes were large and expensive, they depended on connection to the terrestrial network. They would be used principally for data transmission (including a profitable television trade). 33 The building at 33 Thomas, whose section drawings show both satellite and microwave installa - tions, belongs to this period. The doubled height of its upper belt of openings folds the rooftop microwave horns into the building’s architectural language, sup - pressing the equipment’s visual messiness. In the mid-1960s, AT&T was also completing the con - version of its ground wiring to coaxial cable, or coax, first deployed in 1941. Bundling numerous insulated wires within one tube multiplied the usefulness of a single point-to-point connection massively, but main - taining voice quality required peppering the line with periodic “repeaters”: racks of signal-boosting amplifiers that compensated for losses from distance, static, and variations in ground temperature. As expectations of call quality rose, repeaters had to be placed closer together, so while the L-4 standard (1967) could carry up to 32,400 simultaneous calls, it required repeaters every two miles. 34 Coax is thick and heavy, and its production is energy- and labor-intensive, as John Brooks reveals in his description of a 13,000-worker Western Electric wire plant in the 1970s: copper wire is first coated with insulating pulp (itself made in the same room in great vats); then dried in ovens; then twisted into pairs by machines so noisy that their operators must wear ear pads; then combined into units, of many pairs, which are drawn into cable and wrapped with insulating paper. The cable . . . is encased in aluminum and steel, soldered, coated with plastic, and fed onto huge reels; the ends are checked by women who sit sorting out the varicolored pairs as if they were sorting strands of yarn, and testing them with a beeper device. At last the finished cable is charged with gas to keep out mois - ture, capped, and shipped out by truck or rail. 35 Of such intensive chemical processes and gendered industrial work practices are thirty thousand voice transmissions made.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 Ground floor plan of telephone exchange, 204 Second Avenue, New York. From Roger Rodriguez and Elmer F. Chapman, “Communications Disaster at ‘Ma Bell’s’: The Night All the Phones Were Busy,” WNYF , no. 3 (1975). Courtesy WNYF . AT&T sought to link this rebuilt, postwar network to its role as a natural monopoly serving national security needs. The company took immense measures to protect its circuits from attack and to document itself doing so. Bell texts of the late 1960s detail various precautions against nuclear bombs, including the burial of new coax lines, with repeaters sunk in prefabricated manholes. New routes eschewed direct interconnections between major cities, and met instead at rural switching installations—one- to two-story facilities located every 120–160 miles. 36 These were “hardened” in anticipation of blast waves from distant H-bombs, largely by building them as deep as one hundred feet underground. Entered through 1.6-ton doors and stocked with tinned rations, wastewater treat - ment systems, cheery outdoor imagery, and decontamination show - ers, such installations were prepared to run on battery power until fallout levels permitted generator ventilation. 37 AT&T claimed that this construction program would protect network components from anything short of a “direct hit.” 38 In a 1965 advertisement, the Long Lines became a “vital transcontinental link,” supported by “950 buried reinforced con - crete” repeater stations and eleven underground “manned test cen - ters.” Bell had “dug and refilled a 4,000-mile trench to protect 9,300 communications circuits against disaster.” This was “a job that needed the Bell System’s unified research, manufacturing and operating capabilities,” which were offered enthusiastically, since “the defense of the nation comes first.” 39 The reader was meant to accept that the “job” needed to be done, and that without an inte - grated Bell monopoly it might not have been, at the national body’s peril. A 1969 Long Lines document makes clear the stakes: “During a nuclear attack, the preservation of the nation literally would depend on the effectiveness of government communications circuits.” 40 These efforts echo the project of network survivability, a branch of defense thinking encapsulated in a series of 1964 memoranda prepared for the Air Force by RAND Corporation engineer Paul Baran. Baran imagined a robust network, able to bypass destroyed stations through the use of digital switches (akin to the forthcoming ESS) to break up, route, and reassemble information. Baran wed this idea— which, as “packet switching,” became the basis of the Internet—to a diagram of a network not dependent on one or several centers. Testing patterns of nodes and “electrical connections” against hypothetical bomb dispersions in an abstract geographic space defined by explosive radii and by distances between switches, Baran sought “survivability,” measured in the percentage of nodes that, after an attack, would remain in communication with the largest group of other nodes. Baran’s ideal survived the Cold War. Government sources in the early 1990s still spoke of “a series of cir - cles or loops that touch one another to form an interlocking grid.” 41

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 AT&T’s nuclear-proofing was, thankfully, never put to the test, but the network was far from invulnerable. Buried cables are sub - ject to routine physical threats, chiefly from rural landowners and burrowing rodents. A bulldozer error in 1966 disrupted television broadcasts and hundreds of private lines in several states for most of an hour. In 1990, a fiber-optic line was accidentally cut due to the muddy conditions endured by workers handling thick cables in deep manholes. A farmer in the late 1980s cut a line by mistake while burying a dead cow. In response, by 1993, AT&T employed a fleet of thirty-seven planes and helicopters, supported by 1,200 ground personnel in trucks and dune buggies, patrolling millions of miles for potential problems each year and distributing “Call before you dig” reminders. 42 Exchanges, dense with equipment and difficult to replace, are differently vulnerable. Fires at single exchanges have affected tens of thousands of callers for days, weeks, or months. Prompted by a series of outages, government investigations in 1989 and 1991 found that the existing telecommunications apparatus would be inadequate in a disaster, specifically because of the “concentration of network intelligence in large switches and databases,” which meant insufficient “critical-node redundancy.” The network was growing more hierarchical, not less, as the efficiencies of fiber-optic cable and electronic switching encouraged large exchanges. 43 These problems are highlighted by accounts of the February 1975 fire at New York’s 204 Second Avenue mid-rise switching facility (built circa 1930). The fire, which affected 170,000 tele - phones in a 300-block area, began at an open splice between wires in the cable vault, a point of critical intimacy between “node” and “electrical connection” that blurs the distinction between the two. From there, fire and gases spread upward through the cableways to the first two equipment levels. Together with the vault, these con - tained an estimated 175 tons of flammable material. Telephone exchanges pose unique firefighting challenges. Nearly every space is narrow, lightless, and, as the firefighters’ cov - erage repeats, “maze-like,” particularly when full of smoke. During the 1975 fire, dense equipment blocked water streams, and the cableways let suppressant foams sink uselessly into the subbase - ment. Displaced cables blocked one of the vault doors, forcing fire -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 fighters onto the tiny crawl-space ladders. A partition isolating the main distribution frame from dust and lint, along with plastic cov - erings over the ground-floor windows (in anticipation of “civil dis - turbances”), created further obstacles. 44 The cables themselves posed the greatest threat. The trunk lines’ polyethylene sheaths burned relatively “cleanly” but did so long enough to reach the decomposition temperature of the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) used in most other cables in the building. Burning PVC releases dioxins and hydrogen chloride, which turns to hydrochloric acid in respiratory passages. Other byproducts are themselves flammable. Just as the fire seemed under control, the cable vault’s hot copper wires ignited the concentrated gas, and firefighters were forced to retreat from the building. When they regained access, conditions “bordered on the limit of safe operations”: If a man were to let go of the life-line, the chances of him find - ing his way out of the maze-like construction was doubtful. . . . Stripped of their insulation, the banks of wires glowed and radiated heat like a giant toaster—a toaster with an area of close to 30,000 square feet on each floor. 45 The sixteen-hour fire in the cable maze involved 700 firefighters. More than 200 required medical attention, and later reports suggest that they were atypically likely to have retired on disability pen - sions and to have suffered from cancers not normally associated with firefighting. 46 AT&T’s concentration of wiring at dense switch - ing locations, its cost-saving replacement of lead sheathing with PVC, and its desire to protect the network with physical barriers, may have ultimately proved deadly. At the time, AT&T’s priority was restoring service, in a crash effort billed as the “Miracle on Second Avenue.” Thousands of workers clocked twelve-hour shifts for weeks, hauling out 260 tons of ruined underground cable, and 6,000 tons of miscellaneous debris. Ten million individual relays were hand-cleaned with “toothbrushes and Q-tips.” 47 These enor - mous costs may help explain the windowless typology, as replac - ing the open cableways with the wired surface likely offered fireproofing benefits. On the other hand, the new buildings ren - dered innate the dangerously sealed-off, riot-proofed conditions that appeared ad hoc at 204 Second Avenue. A fire at 33 Thomas might not spread quickly, but it would be virtually inaccessible. 48 Many of the outages discussed above postdate 33 Thomas or the Bell System’s demise, but they indicate the tactile and electronic dangers against which AT&T sought hopelessly to guard. The Long Lines were not clean electrical connections between nodes but rather an immense, dispersed assortment of heavily equipped bunkers, easily transformed into nightmares of black smoke shot

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 through by the glow of red-hot wires. Connecting them were dili - gently buried cables and “hardened” microwave stations, none of which could guarantee survival. The network could perhaps be made more robust by building more of it, but the Baranian scheme, in which switches connect only to other switches, elides the issue of how information enters the Long Lines. In the case of telephony, this was at places like 33 Thomas, where thousands or millions of individual telephone lines, possibly consolidated by local offices, are wired up to the intercity trunk lines. Neither the customers nor the staggering matrices of hand-assembled interconnections could be shunted electronically to some other site. Some functions could be relocated, but AT&T preferred to maintain them in urban centers to take advantage of low-wage labor pools. 49 Baran’s networks demonstrated “survivability” only when viewed at a zoom distant enough that the black dots indicating switch points blotted out the tens of millions of lives at stake in his simulated wars. 50 In the end, the most important vulnerability was the legal one. Just as 33 Thomas was being completed in 1974, the Justice Department initiated its final antitrust case against the Bell System. The 1982–1984 settlement, in pursuit of open long-distance com - munication, divorced AT&T and the Long Lines from New York Telephone and twenty-one other local operating companies, then reshuffled the latter into seven units of roughly equal size. The same vast ensemble of wires and switches formed a profoundly dif - ferent system, and the corporate network was shattered without the drop of a single bomb.

4. The Bunker The invulnerable network was one of many images AT&T put forth to depict itself as a good citizen deserving of its unusual regulated- monopoly status. In 33 Thomas and its ilk, architectural language struggled to imply this invulnerability while also signifying public decency. The popular perception of AT&T’s windowless buildings in fallout-prevention terms is supported by architectural coverage of the buildings, as well as by the company’s nuclear-preparation discourse. Indeed, 33 Thomas Street may be read as the absurdly logical consequence of AT&T’s Cold War position: a 540-foot fall - out shelter that fills itself with vital equipment, then announces the effort by emerging from the ground in the nation’s most attractive bombing target. But it was simultaneously designed, with evident care, for grace and gravitas —an effort undone by its bunker- like qualities. In general, AT&T’s preparations for nuclear war were incom - pletely extended to urban switching offices. The 1969 Bell text “Operation Survival,” typical of much civil defense literature published after the Castle Bravo test, focuses its attentions on

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 buildings that are at least ten miles from ground zero, at which dis - tance it still advises underground construction. Excavating a thirty-two-story bunker in Manhattan bedrock, to serve a vaporized constituency, was likely not on the agenda. AT&T’s elision of ther - monuclear warfare’s true risks may simply reflect the impossibility of doing anything about them. Corporate decision-makers may have also taken comfort in projections of a war focused on military targets, or one involving structure-preserving weapons such as the hypothetical neutron bomb—yielding a Manhattan irradiated but intact. 51 Architects had their own rationalizations. The profession was thoroughly accommodative of the civil defense authorities and eager to demonstrate its capacity to provide shelter even to the nuclear-bombarded. 52 Some might have imbibed prewar modernist literature that posited tall, freestanding buildings as inherently resistant to conventional explosives and gas attacks. Architects in the fallout-shelter trade noted with satisfaction that virtually windowless buildings were becoming a “trend” (in brutalist aes - thetics). 53 Others may have even seen in windowlessness a fulfillment of the early-twentieth-century dream that an electrically lit, climate- controlled environment could do away entirely with the “waste” of windows. 54 The doublethink required to fallout-proof a Lower Manhattan skyscraper was a kind of professional competence. “Operation Survival” instead concerns itself with risks to elec - tronic equipment and posits that shielding entire buildings would be more economical than shielding individual circuits. 55 The foot- thick concrete walls of period buildings, implausible as blast shel - ters, may have been intended to shield workers and switches from deadly neutrons and electromagnetic pulses. That the outer sur - faces were filled with critical wires may complicate this reading, but the surrounding materials might have been seen as sufficient protection—or the wires as more expendable than interior equip - ment. “Fallout” might also have been a convenient alibi for a typol - ogy the company favored. The deceptive (or self-deceiving) quality of AT&T’s nuclear preparation is typical of Cold War thinking. As Paul Edwards summarizes strategic air defense, “a genuine defense being impossible, a symbolic one was provided instead.” 56 A set of internal manuals for creating and maintaining survival space, issued by the Long Lines Department as early as 1971, fur - ther elaborate AT&T’s vision. They concern “emergency” planning, applicable to natural disasters and civil disorder but with an emphasis on nuclear attack. 57 Following Office of Civil Defense (OCD) cues, AT&T draws a distinction between shelters solely for employee protection and ones also intended to maintain continued operations, with the latter requiring greater fallout protection. While always meeting this higher standard would be “desirable,”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 particularly since some sites might double as shelters for the gen - eral public, the manuals emphasize the provision of shelter space “particularly in important toll buildings.” 58 Off-duty employees who survived the attack were expected to reach peripheral “report - ing centers,” established by Bell predisaster, then proceed to sur - viving switches with freedom of movement granted specially by civil defense officials. 59 Working for Long Lines was a commitment to spending one’s postapocalyptic life at the office. The style of that life is dictated in a manual for “Shelter Managers,” an OCD-derived role that AT&T adapts with localized references (e.g., the fire hazard posed by a Bell manual) and sug - gests be given to the established head of the office. This “voice of authority,” almost certainly male, would manage resources “towards the safety of the shelterees and the continuation of essen - tial service operations” by controlling the shelter entrance, rationing food and water, and dictating times for work and rest. He would also supervise the enjoyment of card games, songbooks, and nonstrenuous team games to “sustain morale and add zest to shelter living”; time for religious life would be given “serious considera - tion.” 60 References exist to appropriate stockpiles for two-week sur - vival at 811 Tenth Avenue and possibly 33 Thomas. An early design for the latter appears in one of the Bell manuals, illustrating a sec - tion on securing an urban switch building for “personnel who must remain there to operate essential communications equipment.” 61 These guidelines, not wholly unusual for the period, resonate more eerily given the imprecations to “continue near normal oper - ations” serving an unseen body of callers (with whom the automated system’s managers would not speak) and the similitude between shelter conditions and normal working life in a windowless tele - phone exchange. AT&T even supplemented its already stressful management regime with surprise, daylong drills to ensure war- readiness. 62 While managers normally did not have total authority over their staff, the hardened Long Lines enterprise may be as close to living and thinking the conditions of post-Bomb existence as American civilians came. The windowless exchanges concentrate the process David Monteyne identifies in architectural civil defense discourse, whereby war preparation renders ordinary a bunkerized world and even terms like shelter manager suggest the war’s continuity with workaday life. 63 The references to the sealed windows at 204 Second Avenue also remind us that nuclear defense rhetoric, particularly after the first race riots of the mid- 1960s, dovetailed with anxiety regarding civilian populations. Mid-1970s New York saw attacks against Bell properties, including shots fired into an office in Queens and several arsons. 64 Such attacks may have reflected customer dissatisfaction, reactions to AT&T’s discriminatory practices, or wider social militancy against

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 the perceived domination of contemporary life by monopolistic technological capital. They reveal a kind of vulnerability that the hardened exchanges may have been intended to anticipate under the pretext of fallout protection. Ultimately, preserving the equipment was preserving the net - work–and the network stood for national security, even if millions had to be imagined dying in flames outside the walled exchanges. AT&T’s thin commitment to civil defense was made clear by a spokesperson’s 1993 explanation of 33 Thomas’s appearance, with no mention of nuclear dangers. After the Cold War, windowless - ness became a defense against solar infiltration, hurricanes, and terrorism. 65 The implication that AT&T had wisely anticipated then-recent events like Hurricane Andrew and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing may seem like cynical public relations, but it is also typical. As Monteyne points out, the discourse of nuclear civil defense passed directly into that of “emergency management” and later “homeland security.” 66 The new narrative may be no more or less true than earlier claims about fallout.

5. The Telephonic Monument If the company’s nuclear preparations developed a bunker mental - ity to sustain a public-service image, a different and ultimately contradictory civic symbolism emerges in the conventional archi - tectural history of 33 Thomas. A close consideration of formal choices suggests that aesthetics are not necessarily less significant or functional than supposedly neutral, technical criteria, particu - larly where the seemingly “superficial” intervention in the build - ing’s façades is inseparable from the technical capacity packed into the thickness of those very walls. The building’s chosen site was appealingly close to several established exchanges, the Civic Center, the Financial District, and the future World Trade Center. The proximity to Long Lines head - quarters at 32 Avenue of the Americas likely offered opportunities to supplement or replace that building’s capacity. 67 The site also offered an opportunity for good corporate behavior. Like many sur - rounding blocks in this depopulated textile manufacturing district, the block bounded by Thomas, Broadway, Church, and Worth was home to several five-to-six-story lofts with cast-iron façades, lately of interest to preservationists (others having already been lost to a parking lot). New York Telephone, in square-footage negotiations with the city, offered to pay to dismantle the façades and transfer them to the Landmarks Commission “for storage and eventual re-use,” which the commission praised as a “new departure in protecting the city’s architectural heritage.” This goodwill gesture was perhaps more widely noted (e.g., in Architectural Forum and Cast-Iron Pipe News ) than the building that followed. 68

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 AT&T often sought good-neighbor status in its building cam - paigns. A principal of Rose, Beaton & Rose—a firm that designed “about 3,500 structures” for Bell over nearly three decades—told the press in 1972 that they “attempted to blend the buildings into the general façade of the neighborhoods,” while persuading neigh - bors suspicious of “monolithic fortresses” that windows would be “dysfunctional.” One of NYT’s representatives for 33 Thomas, building-engineering vice president John “Jack” Collins, similarly offered the public technical explanations while trumpeting corpo - rate community. The selection of outside design firms likely reflected this public relations program, since Long Lines had its own design team (in 1975, more than 400-strong) versed in con - struction budgets and equipment design and likely dictating the interiors. 69 For 33 Thomas, the company chose the firm of John Carl Warnecke (1919–2010). The choice appears consistent with a good-neighbor policy. While lead designer James T. Ream and partner-in-charge A. Eugene Kohn were both educated at relatively conservative schools, Warnecke was an early product of Walter Gropius’s Harvard. There he may have been exposed to the search for a humanized modernism capable of culturally resonant “monuments.” 70 Appropriately, he came to prominence with a series of regionally inflected modernist school buildings and the similarly flavored U.S. embassy in Bangkok. By the mid-1960s, the growing office was undertaking more technically oriented buildings, but its reputation was staked on civic form-giving, as in the grave of John F. Kennedy and the Hawaii State Capitol. Warnecke’s “humanist architecture” and its “emphasis on the human scale” were praised at length in a 1960 profile by critic Allan Temko, with even a shopping center demon - strating “how warmly industrial technology can be shaped to human needs.” Warnecke had additionally received four citations of merit from Progressive Architecture and one from the AIA Journal . He was a bona fide symbol-maker for large institutions seeking dignity and admiration. 71 A 1969 issue of Architectural Record illustrates the Warnecke firm’s drawings and model photography of 33 Thomas alongside images of their recently completed exchange in Oakland. 72 Under the headline “Designed for machines but mindful of people”—a droll reference to Henry Dreyfuss’s Designing for People —the archi - tectural problems of an exchange are described as “the massing of tall buildings” and their “visual impact” on “the city scene,” even as Ream identifies the windowless project as a “fortress” against fallout. The stated goal, illustrated by a series of iterative composi - tional studies, was to reconcile the legal setback requirements, the company’s floor area needs, and the architects’ desire to avoid a “ziggurat look.” 73 The designers had to allow for both a smaller

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 building (in case the city chose to widen adjacent Worth Street) and Above: Typical floor plan of 33 a larger one, as AT&T intended to later expand the building. The Thomas Street, New York, show - revealing, unbuilt second phase, perhaps abandoned due to the ing unbuilt second phase. From “Designed for Machines but unexpected slowdown in phone subscriptions in the 1970s, would Mindful of People,” Architectural have eliminated the Broadway-side lofts, widened the building by Record 146 (July 1969). Courtesy six bays, and made the Thomas Street entrance the center of a huge, Alice Warnecke. symmetrical elevation. 74 Opposite: Marc Feldman. Night rendering of 33 Thomas Street, Exploiting a code loophole that allowed some bays to run the full New York. From “Designed for height of the building if the rest halted partway, the architects chose Machines but Mindful of People,” to express the building as a series of vertical bays. “All forms,” they Architectural Record 146 (July 1969). Courtesy Alice Warnecke. felt, “should appear to rise from the ground,” and “prematurely cut off forms” would have to “end for a logical and functional reason.” Therefore, the mandatory setback was staged to coincide with the lower belt of mechanical-system vents, while eight (or six) shafts rose to the summit with neither vents nor setback. Visually, these suggested massive tubes of ductwork, or structural piers; in fact, three contained stairs, one contained elevators, and two seem to house either ductwork or storage space. The final design is, by late-modernist aesthetic standards, ele - gantly sculpted—particularly in the slimmer, asymmetrical built version. The projecting bays’ verticality is subtly amplified by the oblong granite panels and the upper openings’ doubled height. The surface indentations fronting each column express the differ - ence between vertical structure and infill, per modernist dictates, while also granting surface relief, like classical column fluting. At the corners, two indentations meet one column, giving a razor’s- edge precision to a joint that could have seemed blocky and awk - ward. 75 Revealing multiple sides of a single bay further supports the impression of a bundled set of impenetrable tubes (something like phone cables, perhaps). These compositional tricks make for a building more dynamic and elegant than the 811 Tenth Avenue exchange, where the setbacks are accepted as facts and each mass is treated as a solid block from which the flat bays—faced in workaday brick—project only slightly. Warnecke’s much smaller facility for NYT in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was also comparatively boxy and severe but far too short to require setbacks; it could therefore remain a simple rectangular prism. According to a functionalist discourse that underlies the refusal to “cut off” forms at arbitrary points, these other buildings were

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 perhaps more “honest” in representing their contents as bulky, stereometric boxes. By that standard, 33 Thomas would be redolent of Beaux-Arts practice or historicist exchanges of earlier decades. But to the building’s makers, this was the appropriate way to insert an enormous, windowless object into the skyline. 76 Their intentions become clearest in a nighttime perspective ren - dering of the “Phase Two” version, seen from Broadway. Three fig - ures stand on the gridded plaza before the tower. Flanking it are two twenty-five-foot ventilation stacks for the basement diesels, offering visual “weight” to the building’s base and corresponding to the uppermost openings’ approximation of a cornice. A caption claims that the vents allow “a sense of the building’s great scale”; that is, they provide a medium-size reference point reconciling the observer to the building’s height. 77 Vertical shafts of light shoot up the building’s indented surface from hexagonal tubes, vaguely sug - gesting a gigantic fluorescent lightbulb or, perhaps, the building’s “electronic” role. But when combined with the axial approach, the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 building’s proportions, and the expression of setbacks as lateral subtractions on two sides, the lighting suggests not modernist equipment but Rockefeller Center—New York’s most famous attempt at producing “public space” via private capital. The heroic expression of the “functional” tubes also makes this one of many projects indebted to Louis Kahn’s monumentalization of laboratory ductwork in the Richards Medical Laboratories (1957–1965). A range of architects had lately sought new expressive and client-pleasing possibilities by challenging the relationship of curtain wall, structure, and services. The radical transformation of the wall surface at 33 Thomas momentarily appears as a mere ges - ture in a brutalist polemic: the complete expansion of ductwork to displace the curtain wall. 78 The building also bears comparison to a number of prominent New York buildings of its era: quasi- windowless or mechanically “belted” office towers like Four New York Plaza (Carson, Lundin & Shaw, 1968) and 55 Water Street (Emery Roth & Sons, 1972); housing ennobled by medievalizing shafts, as at Waterside Plaza (Davis, Brody, and Associates, 1963– 1974); and academic institutions with opaque surfaces grouped into verticals, as in the laboratory and classroom towers of Rockefeller University (Campbell, Aldrich & Nutty, 1974) and Yeshiva University (Armand Bartos, 1967–1968). 79 Warnecke and Ream would later be praised for entering “the grand tradition of civic buildings” with a government project that recapitulates several of 33 Thomas’s features. 80 Thus, 33 Thomas appears to have been intended, like AT&T’s later, postmodern headquarters build - ing (Johnson & Burgee, 1978–1984) to mobilize then-current archi - tectural language’s favored signifiers for durability and good intentions in a tall, systems-intensive building. Given all possible designs for a telephone exchange, Warnecke’s office chose a mod - ernist campanile (a Bell tower). While the dramatized solidity of the windowless buildings addresses AT&T’s self-fulfilling implica - tions of vulnerability, architectural civitas offered to rejustify the monopoly in an era when Lily Tomlin could win a Grammy Award for comic impressions of a power-mad telephone operator. These choices may also have been seen as continuous with earlier efforts to give tangible and lofty form to the electronic signal. The more conventionally civic architecture of the 1920s and 1930s com - plemented such public relations efforts as encouraging off-duty operators to refer to their employment when doing kindnesses to strangers. 81 A 1967 company film, Without Fail , hints at Bell’s rep - resentational challenges in the age of automation. Customers, it explains, may “take for granted” the work enabling telephony. The film struggles to make visible the in-between of call completion, for example, through animated overlays of the call routes reviewed by the switches. 82 The 1969 short film Operator shows remaining

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 cord-board operators patiently dealing with customers’ anger, con - fusion, and sexual advances. The operators employ measures of personalization hardly available to workers at electronic panels, which monitored users to minimize and standardize interactions. 83 To the camera, the operators describe their jobs as satisfying but filled with small difficulties. Cutaways depict wildly clanking (electromechanical) switches in operation, while one operator reports that some customers behave “like the operator’s a machine.” 84 The film appears to be a plea for sympathy, but it may also be read as an attempt to maintain human operators as symbols, even while replacing them with ever more advanced machines. Similarly, the design of 33 Thomas strives to suggest that AT&T is not a faceless machine but a human (if hardworking) operation that could take its place in the city’s symbolic skyline with due gravitas. To the architectural public, the message came through. Architectural Record noted the architects’ “concern for [33 Thomas’s] impact on people and on the city itself,” as well as their “imagination and skill” in addressing “human-scaled streets.” Critic Paul Goldberger deemed 33 Thomas NYT’s “one building of distinction,” with the architects having “evolved a powerful new form” from functional requirements. Earlier press coverage of the design noted the “unusual feature” of the vertical tubes but made no note of the windowless appearance. 85 But critical standards were in flux. Architectural and journalistic observers increasingly sought complexly programmed, formally variegated urbanism and stressed the ways in which a building participated in a socially or visually coherent field. 86 In this light, 33 Thomas was a retrograde modernist dinosaur. William Whyte would use a full-page photograph of the “under siege” building to open a chapter on “Blank Walls,” features epitomizing corporate and governmental “power and fear” and “distrust of the city.” The 1978 AIA Guide to New York , elsewhere sympathetic to late-modernist civic form-giving, sniffs at the “giant electronic complex in the guise of a building”—a “stylish leviathan” that “looms over the city” with “the bleak plaza” being the “only bow to the neighboring humanity.” Much later, Robert Stern found the building a “brutal blow” to the neighborhood and an “almost parodic” emulation of Kahn. 87 The attempts to convey dignity at the skyline level had suc - ceeded for those who sought them. The attempts to convey plaza- level civic goodwill were undone by the impenetrability of the bunker. Alternately, readers seeking an architecture of glass win - dows lacked the means by which to evaluate a tower of wired walls. AT&T’s monopoly depended on convincing policy makers that its unmatched scale was needed to keep the network safe from real and imagined threat. Its architecture proclaimed this invulnerabil - ity by sacrificing it at the network’s most critical points. The wired

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 walls of 33 Thomas communicated many things, even as they con - cealed the labor of the skilled technicians, underpaid operators, and white-collar supervisors, all undertaking a coal-miner’s jour - ney into fluorescent spaces haunted by real and imagined dangers. But the claustrophobic dungeon glimpsed in the 1975 fire and the 1991 outage—the world to which AT&T expected its employees to return in the event of thermonuclear war—comports uncomfort - ably with the Warnecke team’s stately pillar and dooms the effort. Equal parts Tell Tale Heart and Cask of Amontillado, AT&T’s archi - tecture announces the very things it walls away. Today 33 Thomas is no longer, or not solely, a telephone exchange. Its ESS banks were decommissioned in 2009, and by most accounts the current tenant, Verizon Communications (a Bell descendant), uses it as a data center, leasing out physical space for Internet servers. 88 Many of the features of a hardened telephone exchange—space, connections, structural capacity, and the impres - sion of security—are attractive to entities handling vast quantities of Internet traffic. Telephony still requires buildings, however. In 2010, architec - tural firm SOM unveiled plans for an emergency call center in the northeast Bronx, a project now nearing completion. This facility, prompted by a post-9/11 program, is meant to help “maintain communications in the event of a natural disaster or large-scale emergency” and to “operate continuously under adverse condi - tions”; it will be “blast-resistant . . . with minimal windows due to security concerns.” To avoid an “oppressively defensive” appear - ance, these limited openings are visually enlarged by inward cants in the surface of vertical aluminum strips. As a further consolation, the design includes a LEED-friendly vegetated wall, meant to “create a soothing environment for stressful [ sic ] call takers” while also providing “a natural air filter, drawing toxins.” 89 The Bronx project, then, is a telephone building. Like 33 Thomas it unites contemporary communications technology, clichés of good citizenship, and shibboleths justifying defensiveness and fear. AT&T’s hopeless search for an architecture commensurate to its troubled rhetorical apparatus was profoundly entwined with mid - century technological automation, Cold War politics, and the unique legal situation of the telephone monopoly. But the material and metaphorical infrastructures the company put in place still haunt our digital lives, and we are obliged to probe our present- day wires and switches—to ask who builds our Internet, and in whose name.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 Notes I am grateful to Reinhold Martin, the editors of Grey Room , and Janet Whitson Burns for their close readings and insightful feedback.

1. Leon Battista Alberti, The Ten Books of Architecture (1485), trans. Giacomo Leoni (1755; New York: Dover, 1986), bk. 1, ch. 2, xii. 2. William Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Anchor Books/ Doubleday, 1988), 224–25. 3. Semi-Automatic Ground Environment radar bunkers, as John Harwood observes, connected “only to other blue rooms and their weaponized extensions,” thus extending control “over the ground environment—the defensible territory— only as they segregate[d] themselves spatially as thoroughly as possible from that environment.” While AT&T’s installations also appear to reject their immediate surroundings for a “space” defined by distant outposts, they are functionally tied to their surroundings by wires strung through earth and sky to local telephones. The buildings thus act as a material infrastructure for the immediate environment . John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 123–24. 4. New York City Department of Buildings, Certificate of Occupancy for 33 Thomas Street, no. 74182 (January 1974). This and subsequent certificates of occu - pancy were accessed through http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob/. 5. New York City Department of Buildings, Certificate of Occupancy for 111 Wall Street, no. 66890 (December 1968). In structural design, “live loads” are the forces produced by “temporary” weights in the building, such as those of people, furniture, and equipment. 6. Richard D. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010); and Susan E. McMaster, The Telecommunications Industry (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 18, 29–30. “Natural monopoly” claims were favored by utilities in Progressive-era America. See David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 175–81. 7. John Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 233–38; “New Warning System for Defense,” Broadcasting , 26 July 1971, 45–46; AT&T, Long Lines: The Bell System Unit for Nationwide and Worldwide Communications (AT&T, 1969), 67–68; McMaster, 81; and Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 106. 8. See, for example, Associated Press, “Weinberger Defends AT&T,” New York Times , 9 April 1981; and Merrill Brown, “U.S. Phone Lines Called Vulnerable: Centralization Cited,” Washington Post , 6 May 1981. 9. Peter Temin and Louis Galambos, The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and McMaster, 46, 53–55, 74–78. 10. Temin and Galambos, esp. 26–28, 42–43, 75, 101–5; and McMaster, 73–79, 87, 94–95. 11. Temin and Galambos, 105. 12. A. Michael Noll, Introduction to Telephones and Telephone Systems , 3rd ed. (Boston: Artech House, 1998), 128–31; McMaster, 58–59. 13. Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 89 –112, 159 –65; and Noll, 174–75.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 14. Brooks, 278 –79, 336 –37; and Green, 133, 159 –91. Male laborers also found themselves deskilled, if not in the same ways. See Green, 241. 15. Brooks, 290–91; and Green, 214 –224. 16. “Windowless Skyscraper,” Architectural Forum , no. 117 (December 1962): 17; and “Windowless Phone Building,” Progressive Architecture , no. 43 (August 1963): 56, 58. “[B]rightly lighted and colored” offices were meant to “compensate” for the absence of windows. “Windowless Phone Building,” 56. 17. In 1972, NYT owned eighty-three buildings in New York City and occupied “more space than anyone else in the state, including the government.” Paul Goldberger, “When Building for Future Means a Step Backwards,” New York Times , 6 December 1975, 33; Pranay Gupte, “Telephone Buildings Now Windowless,” New York Times , 11 June 1972, R8; and Glenn Fowler, “AT&T to Put Up 550-Foot Building,” New York Times , 21 November 1967, 50. 18. Analogies might be drawn to other mechanical systems, particularly plumb - ing. AT&T favored high-rise designs even where land prices might not have required them, as in the Rego Park case, where only community pressure halted plans for a 320-foot building. 19. Noll, 133–34; and Roger Rodriguez and Elmer F. Chapman, “Communications Disaster at ‘Ma Bell’s’: The Night All the Phones Were Busy,” WNYF , no. 3 (1975): 5. 20. See the illustration of a wall detail in “Designed for Machines but Mindful of People,” Architectural Record , no. 146 (July 1969): 128. While I cannot confirm that the same detail holds in other windowless exchanges, they are suggestively consistent in appearance (see http://www.thecentraloffice.com/). AT&T also seems unlikely to have permitted an outside firm to invent such a crucial detail, and Architectural Record— which prints the illustration without commentary—would hardly have ignored the innovation. 21. Green, 86, 171 –73. These details invite comparison to nineteenth-century textile mills, in which steam jets were sometimes used during summer to main - tain humidity suitable for the machinery and material, disregarding the needs of the workforce, again predominantly female. See Robert B. Gordon, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 385. 22. “Windowless Skyscraper”; “Windowless Phone Building,” 56; and Gupte, R8. 23. “Nucleus of an Electronics Center,” Progressive Architecture 45 (November 1964): 156. 24. “Nucleus of an Electronics Center,” 156; and “Telephone Tower for Lower Manhattan,” Progressive Architecture , no. 49 (January 1968): 28. The FCC would later report to Congress that the windowless condition at 33 Thomas was primarily a matter of reducing maintenance and energy costs. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Government Operations, Asleep at the Switch? Federal Communications Commission Efforts to Assure Reliability of the Public Telephone Network (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), 458. 25. Brooks, 287–89, 296–303; Glenn Fowler, “Century-Old Cast Iron Building Façades to Be Saved Downtown,” New York Times , 26 November 1967, R1; and Temin and Galambos, 72–73. 26. Brooks, 290–92. 27. This account relies extensively on testimony and documents assembled by the congressional investigations. The key passages are U.S. Congress, Telephone Network Reliability (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992), 13, 144–48, 208–9; and U.S. Congress, Asleep at the Switch , 151–53, 455–66, 484–93. 28. U.S. Congress, Asleep at the Switch , 151–53.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 29. U.S. Congress, Asleep at the Switch , 460 –63, 489. 30. U.S. Congress, Asleep at the Switch, 464 –65. Wood may have been chosen in part as an insulator against the tremendous current. In 2010, a worker in 33 Thomas’s subcellar was hospitalized with severe burns when a relay arced. Reported as a matter of defective or exposed wiring, the accident was later settled as “worker error.” New York City Department of Buildings, Complaint for 33 Thomas Street, no. 1273717, 14 January 2010. 31. U.S. Congress, Telephone Network Reliability , 65–66. 32. Brooks, 244–45; McMaster, 73–74, 111; and Noll, 67–71. 33. Brooks, 275; AT&T, Long Lines , 67; and Noll, 82–83. 34. Brooks, Telephone, 244–45; AT&T, Long Lines , 20; Noll, 64–66; and F.H. Blecher et al., “L-4 Coaxial System,” Bell System Technical Journal 48, no. 4 (1969): 822–23. 35. Brooks, 324–25. 36. J.W. Foss and R.W. Mayo, “Operation Survival,” Electronics World , August 1969, 41–43. Some of this article, a reprint from the Bell Laboratories’ Record , recurs in later Bell publications and may borrow from earlier sources. See also AT&T, Long Lines , 20; and Blecher et al., 836–37. 37. See, for example, the photographic tour of the Clarksville, New York, station at http://www.coldwarcomms.org/. 38. Foss and Mayo, 42; “AT&T Opens $8 Million Communications Superhighway,” New Pittsburgh Courier , 6 November 1971; and “Radio-TV Circuits Cut by Bulldozer,” Broadcasting 71, no. 13 (1966). For hints of the extent of real con struc - tion, see David Kenny, “Underground Site Hides Importance of AT&T Center,” New Haven Register , 30 June 1996; and Steve Luttner, “Doomsday Switchboard,” Cleveland Plain Dealer , 29 March 1995. The “short of a direct hit” language is typ - ical of the period. See David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 36. The microwave system, too, was presented in 1951 as an answer to defense’s “heavy and urgent” demands. See Bell Telephone System, “New Skyway Spans Nation with Words and Pictures,” magazine advertisement, 1951. 39. Bell Telephone System, “We Dug and Refilled a 4,000 Mile Trench . . . ,” magazine advertisement, 1965. 40. AT&T, Long Lines , approx. 70–72. 41. Paul Baran, “Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks,” in On Distributed Communications (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1964); and U.S. Congress, Telephone Network Reliability , 144. See also Peter Galison, “War against the Center,” Grey Room , no. 4 (Summer 2001): 5–33. 42. “Radio-TV Circuits Cut by Bulldozer,” 10; U.S. Congress, Telephone Network Reliability , 23; U.S. Congress, Asleep at the Switch , 447–51; and John Eckhouse, “AT&T Defense Department Defends Underground Cable,” Journal Record , 22 July 1993. While the exact date this “defense” program began is unclear, its existence serves as a reminder that today’s fiber-optic Internet remains profoundly physical. 43. U.S. Congress, Asleep at the Switch , 461; and National Research Council, Growing Vulnerability of the Public Switched Networks: Implications for National Security Emergency Preparedness (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989), 11–13, 24–25, 49–53, 64. For examples of fire damage to exchanges, see Edward Gargan, “Phone System Fails, Isolating New York City,” New York Times , 16 March 1982; and Elizabeth Neuffer, “In Brooklyn, Life without Telephones,” New York Times , 20 February 1987.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 44. Brooks, 306–8; Roger Allan, “The Great New York Telephone Fire,” IEEE Spectrum , 1975, 34–40; and Rodriguez and Chapman, 4–9. 45. Rodriguez and Chapman, 9. 46. Allan, 37; and “’75 Blaze Haunts Firemen with Disease,” Chicago Tribune , 18 December 1983, 4. 47. Allan, 34, 38–40; and Brooks, 306–8. The company film Miracle on Second Avenue , available online at the AT&T Tech Channel, http://techchannel.att.com, documents not only the restoration efforts but the shocking condition of the exchange just after the fire, as masses of stripped and sodden wire dangle crazily out of their frames, dripping in the darkness. 48. See New York Department of Buildings, Certificate of Occupancy for 204 Second Avenue, no. 16739 (August 1930); “Designed for Machines,” 129 (draw - ing); Gupte, R8; and Rodriguez and Chapman, 4. By the time of 33 Thomas Street, chemical fire suppression systems (e.g., Halon) might have altered the situation. 49. Green, 212–13. 50. Baran’s outlook was typical of RAND discourse. See, for example, Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). 51. The Los Angeles Times worried that neutron bombs would render existing arsenals “as useful as a bunch of cabbages.” That nuclear detonations in general produced electromagnetic pulse effects was public knowledge at least by 1964. See “Red Neutron Bomb Held Newest Peril,” Los Angeles Times , 27 March 1962, 6; and United States Department of Defense, Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, DC: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1964), 502–5. 52. See Monteyne; and Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). Consider also the evident preoccupation with destruction in texts not primarily concerned with war, such as Richard Neutra’s Survival through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954). 53. Monteyne, 160; Stephen Graham, “Cities as Strategic Sites: Place Annihilation and Urban Geopolitics,” in Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics , ed. Stephen Graham (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 38–40; and José Luis Sert, Can Our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their Solutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 66–69. By the 1960s, the architectural trade press, like the Office of Civil Defense, avoided discussing urban bombardment or based calculations on outdated bombs. See, for example, Philip Will, Jr., “Design for Survival,” Architectural Record 131 (January 1962): 127 –134. 54. See Nye, 364–65. 55. Foss and Mayo, 42. For an earlier, unblinking projection of thermonuclear effects in Manhattan, see the Office of Civil Defense Mobilization film Operation Ivy (1952), available online at the Internet Archive, http://archive.org/. See also Monteyne, 9, fig. 1.4. By the late 1970s, AT&T’s internal manuals would more can - didly describe mile-wide craters and steel-melting fireballs. See Bell Telephone System, “Nuclear Design Loads,” in Bell System Practices (AT&T, 1984), sec. 760- 200-024, 1. This and other relevant Bell manuals are available online at www.long- lines.net/documents/. 56. Edwards, 90. 57. Bell Telephone System, “Civil Defense in Long Lines,” in Bell System Practices (AT&T, 1971), sec. 002-501-906 LL, 1. Whether some of these manuals’ content was recycled from earlier editions is unclear. 58. Bell Telephone System, “Nuclear Design Loads,” 3; and Bell Telephone

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 System, “Civil Defense Shelter Requirements,” in Bell System Practices (1971), sec. 002-501-907 LL, 1 –3. As Monteyne points out with regard to civil defense at large, “protection factor” numbers were always subject to “qualitative fluctuations in the national sense of threat or in the political status of shelterees.” AT&T’s dis - tinction between 1:100 and 1:40 exposure ratios (versus outside conditions) match the OCD’s calculated distinction between “continuity-of-government facilities” and public shelters. Monteyne, 63, 212–15. 59. Bell Telephone System, “Civil Defense in Long Lines,” 3–4. 60. Bell Telephone System, “Shelter Operations and Supplies,” in Bell System Practices (1971), sec. 002-501-909. 61. Bell Telephone System, “Engineering Planning: Long Lines Plans for Survivable Communications,” in Bell System Practices (AT&T, 1974), sec. 001-780- 201 LL, 10, 16. 62. AT&T, Long Lines , approx. 70–72. 63. Monteyne, esp. 90–93 on “shelter managers.” 64. Brooks, 287; “AT&T New York Unit Is Again the Target of Malicious Action,” Wall Street Journal , 14 March 1975, 19; and Judith Cummings, “New Phone Blaze Termed 2d Arson,” New York Times , 8 March 1975, 55. 65. Jesse McKinley, “F.Y.I.,” New York Times , 4 December 1994. 66. Monteyne, 277. 67. In addition to the Long Lines headquarters, 33 Thomas was also a short walk from the New York Telephone headquarters at 140 West Street, AT&T’s head - quarters at 195 Broadway, and the former Western Union telegraph building at 60 Hudson Street. 68. Fowler, “Century-Old Cast Iron,” R1–R4; Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes: Façades in Storage, Links to the Cast-Iron Era Await Reconstruction,” New York Times , 10 June 1990; and Robert A.M. Stern, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 163. The fate of these façades, which were to be stored near the Manhattan Bridge approach in Brooklyn, is unclear. Four of the Broadway lofts remain on-site. For site information, see New York City Department of Buildings, Certificate of Occupancy for 66–78 Worth Street and 19–29 Thomas Street, no. 58064 (July 1963); and the 1938, 1955, and 1964–1965 editions of the Landbook of the Borough of Manhattan, New York (New York: G.W. Bromley). 69. AT&T, Long Lines , page unknown; Goldberger, 33; Gupte, R8; and Jonathan Hale, “Clients in the 1970s: New Realities, More Management,” Architectural Record , no. 148 (October 1970): 138–39. As Collins pointed out, the size of the internal plant design group made it the equivalent of the country’s largest design firms. Goldberger, 33. 70. Ream (1929–2010) was educated at Cornell and Pratt just after the war and worked for Eero Saarinen. Kohn (b. 1930) was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, around the same time, and would later establish KPF, now one of the world’s largest firms. On “monumentality” and “regionalism,” see Christiane Crasemann Collins and George Roseborough Collins, “Monumentality: A Critical Matter in Modern Architecture,” Harvard Architectural Review 4 (1984): 14 –35; and Mitchell Schwarzer, “Modern Architectural Ideology in Cold War America,” in The Education of the Architect: Historiography, Urbanism, and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge , ed. Martha Pollak (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997): 87 –109. 71. “Designed for Machines,” 128; Allan Temko, “The Humanist Architecture of John Carl Warnecke,” Architectural Forum 113 (1960): 97–98; and “James T.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 Ream: Death Notice,” San Francisco Chronicle , 15 August 2010. For citations, see January issues of Progressive Architecture (1959, 1960, 1962, 1963) and AIA Journal , April 1960. The firm would receive a full AIA Honor Award in 1974 and another Progressive Architecture citation in 1968. 72. “Designed for Machines,” 123–30. The Oakland building was built with eye-level windows along two sides. Later renovations exaggerate these with grid - ded expanses of reflective glass. 73. “Designed for Machines,” 126. The “ziggurat” comment is probably a veiled critique of the 811 Tenth Avenue exchange. 74. Goldberger, 33; and “Designed for Machines.” 75. Such corners recall the by-then canonical work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 76. The handling of the microwave towers, with openings formally resembling the purely mechanical belt at the tenth floor, similarly trades naked functionalism for compositional unity. At 811 Tenth Avenue, undisguised and unique openings address the particular need of line-of-sight transmission. 77. Similar vents were constructed at the building’s west end. 78. See Harwood, 143–48; and Timothy Rohan, “Challenging the Curtain Wall: Paul Rudolph’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield Building,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66, no. 1 (2007): 84–109. This strand of postwar mod - ernism leads, through Archigram and Cedric Price, to “High-Tech” architecture; the design of the Centre Pompidou (1971–1977) also emphasizes “technological” apparatus at the expense of traditional windows. 79. These in turn could be compared to smaller, widely admired and quasi- windowless brutalist public buildings such as the nearby Civic Center Synagogue (William Breger, 1967) or Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum (1963–1966). 80. This building, the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, shares the symmetrical long façade, the oblong masonry rectangles, and the cere - monial approach to the short side, illuminated at night. “Impressive New Government Center around a Grand Atrium Space,” Architectural Record 161, no. 3 (March 1977): 101–106. 81. Green, 144–45, 155. 82. AT&T, Without Fail , short film, 1967. 83. Automation of long-distance and overseas calls generally lagged behind that of local service. See Green, 129–30, 214–20, 250. 84. AT&T, Operator , short film, 1969. 85. “Designed for Machines,” 126; Fowler, “AT&T to Put up 550-Foot Building,” 50; and Goldberger, 33. 86. This shift, which might loosely be seen as “postmodern,” can be approxi - mated by reference to Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, and Aldo Rossi, among many others. 87. Stern, 163; Whyte, 224–26; and Norval White and Elliot Willensky, AIA Guide to New York City , rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 43, emphasis in original. 88. Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis, Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies (Barcelona: Actar Editorial, 2007), 71–72; and Verizon New York, “Retirement and Removal of Verizon Broadway 4ESS Tandem,” memorandum, 8 December 2009, http://www22.verizon.com/wholesale/attach - ments/industry_letters/IL09-0065.pdf. 89. Joey Arak, “SOM’s Bulletproof Bunker Proves 911 Is Not a Joke,” Curbed.com , 19 January 2010, http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2010/01/19/soms_bulletproof_ bronx_bunker_proves_911_is_not_a_joke.php; Patrick Rocchio, “PSAC II Enhances

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00184 by guest on 30 September 2021 911 Safety,” Bronx Times , 15 September 2011; and SOM, “Public Safety Answering Center II,” http://www.som.com/projects/public_safety_answering_center_ii. The building’s location is said to protect it from possible terrorist attacks on downtown Manhattan. Whether it invites such attacks in the Bronx is left undiscussed.

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