“Anyone can make a case for the outside.” [1]
An entry in fourteen small windows, flanked by two glass revolving doors and two glass swing doors. Taken together, just over five hundred square feet of transparent fenestration, or just a fraction of one percent of a stone-and-concrete monolith stretching five hundred and thirty-two feet high and covering a surface area equal to two Manhattan blocks. Described as the “world’s tallest blank wall,”[2] John Carl “Jack” Warnecke & Associates’ 33 Thomas Street (1966–1974)[3] — constructed in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) to primarily house electrical switching systems, microwave horns, satellites, and other communications equipment essential for its Long Lines network — is among the most materially opaque urban architectures of the past century.”
Ever seen your telephone switchboard?
It’s a fascinating sight…”
Admitting a certain disregard for building type, if not for tenancy, one might compare 33 Thomas’s near-zero fenestration to other telecommunications buildings in New York. 195 Broadway (William Welles Bosworth, 1912–1922), the neoclassical headquarters for AT&T until 1984 and site of the first transatlantic and picturephone calls, has less than twenty percent fenestration. Similarly, the art deco Barclay-Vessey Building (Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker, 1923–1927)[4] and neo-Grec former Western Union Building (George B. Post, 1928– 1930), both constructed to house extensive telecommunications infrastructure, feature facades with less than twenty-five percent glass. And AT&T’s postmodern headquarters in the landmarked “Chippendale” building at 550 Madison Avenue (Johnson/Burgee, 1973–1984), though far more opaque than its Midtown neighbors, boasts more than thirty percent fenestration. Even one of 33 Thomas’s closest contemporaries, the likewise brutalist 375 Pearl Street (Rose, Beaton & Rose, 1975), has reduced much of its opacity in converting wall-less switching floors into open-plan offices and data centers. Arrival at the interior of 33 Thomas is, by comparison, entirely withheld.
“Cover ground by phone.”
Standing before the blank expanse of Warnecke’s design, one sees almost nothing — a towering wall of pink Swedish granite, offering little hint at the innumerable wires, ducts, and lives within. A difficult-to-determine number of stories, the building is set back from the sidewalk, asymmetrically atop a wedge-shaped plinth-cum-podium. Almost head high at the tower’s western face, this podium opens to what appears to be the building’s back; ventilation volumes, ramps to below-grade parking, and fencing converge here. Tapering toward the east to meet the level of a locked mid-block plaza, its northern face acts more as a street wall, closely hugging the building, while its southern face sees the podium solidify into plinth and expand to accommodate steps up to the aforementioned entry and a small raised plaza, curiously lacking any handrails.
“Reach out. Reach out and touch someone.”
Looking upward, an expansive bronze awning extends to the sidewalk. It appears to hold less in common with the building’s wider expression than with its surrounding street lights,[5] purposefully aligned with the chamfered recesses articulating the shafts and bays of the tower’s envelope. A four-two rhythm, cut off before achieving symmetry in an unbuilt second phase, with walls rising uninterrupted except for one series of openings that projects one third up the tower’s height. And, at its peak, a second, taller series behind which antennas peek. Perhaps most telling, there is one last set of interruptions: dome and bullet security cameras, scattered across 33 Thomas’s stone surface, to surveil threats beyond its walls.
“Because all secure phones are not created equal.”
Described by its project design director in 1969 as “a twentieth-century fortress,”[6] opacity at 33 Thomas is couched, at least in part, in an effort to secure the high- speed communications networks it contains from Cold War nuclear threats.[7] “If [communications] installations must be located within ‘danger’ areas,” notes a 1969 article in Bell Laboratories Record titled “Operation Survival,” they are to be “constructed in such a way as to ‘harden’ them against the effects of a nuclear attack.”[8] For long- distance microwave radio-relay antennas like those topping and communicating with 33 Thomas, this meant quite literal bunker logics: shock isolation, blast locks, expendable access structures, cutting-edge heat-reflective coatings, beryllium windows, and thick but floating concrete shells buried in the earth.
“[A] ‘hard’ system… virtually immune to natural disaster or enemy attack.”
Requiring increased resistance to radioactive fallout reflecting its status as a major communications hub, 33 Thomas was designed with provisions for on-site power generation, a cafeteria, bunks, and other necessities to shelter over one thousand and five hundred occupants in place for a period of two weeks following a nuclear attack.[9] (In legal fact, occupancy per level falls as low as five and rarely exceeds twenty to twenty- five persons.) Long Lines Department documents make provisions for Civil Defense coordination to be run by Shelter Managers, a predetermined “voice of authority.”[10] Organization is laid out for radiological, fire prevention, maintenance, communications, and the aforementioned managerial work. Recommendations are made for everything from recreation and spiritual activities to morale and feeding. And a supply list quantifies essentials: denture paste and dehydrated food, playing cards and folding cots, Bibles and dosimeters.
“The communications network is alive!”
Like the Atlantic Wall bunkers so lucidly described by philosopher Paul Virilio, AT&T’s New York network hub demonstrates its own kind of symbolic solidity. Apparently protective of occupants that never arrive en masse ––and in fact are not legally afforded by the aforementioned maximum occupancies –– the structure is in truth built to protect the machine (and machinery) of high-speed communication. It is a hardened building in support of a likewise hardened communications network.
“The system is the solution.”
At the same moment that the blank, solid bunkerization of 33 Thomas may be said to erase or obscure its inner purpose, aspects of its hardened design quietly communicate how this interior content extends from subterranean wires to cable duct chamfers, from microwave horns and mechanical miscellanea to precast hoods, and from open floor plates filled with electronic switches to a monolithic stone shell. Warnecke adopted paired pragmatic design restraints: first, the avoidance of any stepped massing; second, the refusal of any indifferent termination of the resulting vertical mass. Notably, together these limits do much to subsume the building’s exterior within related logics of its interior.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if everything worked this well?”
Running from basement-level cable vaults to rooftop microwave horns and satellites, cable ducts are part and parcel of the building’s cladding system, running directly behind the granite veneered concrete panels describing its envelope. Maximizing open floor area for coaxial, microwave relay, and electronic switching systems, these slots are the hidden logic behind the dimensional relief expressed on the tower’s exterior.
“A two-inch empty pipe can carry 230,000 telephone conversations.”
Modeled recesses align with columns, allowing the space between them to run up uninterrupted; cables, encased in terracotta tile and concrete block, can fill this space in full before beginning their unraveling across cable trays and toward switches, control panels, and more. So closely packed are these technological apparatuses, writes historian Addison Godel in his elucidating history of the intertwinings of AT&T’s network power and Warnecke’s design, that 33 Thomas may well be considered the “densest inhabitable object in New York City.”[11] Placed as little as two feet apart on heavily structured floors (300–400 PSF), switch frames almost double the allowable loads of typical towers.[12]
“Annihilator of space.”
Like these myriad cables, for which cutting meant error or failure, any severance at 33 Thomas is either refused or carefully crowned. Just as base volumes terminate with a tenth-floor mechanical level and associated hoods, tower volumes terminate with their own nineteenth-floor mechanical level and (even larger) hoods. Ventilation required by subterranean levels is collected not on the surface of the building but in one tucked-away cubic, two oversized vent-cap, and four chamfered rectilinear volumes. But it is in a late ’60s photograph of the project’s architectural model that the depth of this notion reaches its conclusion: up a series of steps at the building’s southern face, hidden by the awning ultimately constructed, are two deep voids matching those expressed above. A front door or four, it may be said, that serve as final terminations of Warnecke’s “bundle of towers.”
“Live next door to all your friends… by telephone!”
One might rightly ask: Who stands behind this door? Is it the anonymous office worker? Or the specialized technician fighting a Sisyphean battle against obsolescence? Is it building security? Or perhaps a manager, prepared on paper or on screen to assume power in times of crisis? Recent history offers at least one answer. Hidden behind the negligible fenestration of 33 Thomas’s entry — whether in cellar levels or tucked away elsewhere — is a hub for national and international surveillance by the National Security Administration (NSA).[13]
“The implement of the nation.”[14]
Tapping into the very cables that are the building’s ethos — long-distance telephone, satellite, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and other network communications and data transfers — all manner of “threats” are intercepted. The aforementioned material opacity, still in the name of “security,” ultimately serves to compromise the informational opacity of dozens of countries and, undoubtedly, American citizens. “How the telephone helps… to be five busy people.” Herein lies the duplicity of 33 Thomas. At the same moment it obfuscates its own interior, revealing itself only slightly to make its coaxial contents clear, its wires and waves endorse and embolden our very own transparency. To wit, a late ’50s advertisement from Bell Systems (AT&T) suggests the telephone allows one to wear no less than five (busy and woefully gendered) hats at once: a chef’s toque, a nursing cap, a chauffeur’s service cap, a maid’s mobcap, and a veiled pillbox. Already echoing the performative self- exploitation and market-driven narcissism described by philosopher Byung-Chul Han,[15] the telephone allows one to cook, heal, shuttle, clean, and at last consume. AT&T’s innovative long-distance data-transfer and subsequent fiber-optic networks, of which Warnecke’s building remains an essential hub, only accelerate the transfer of information — and with it, the shift toward evermore fragmentary and performative identities.
“The fastest information is right at your fingertips.”
In this way, however totalizing its material opacity, 33 Thomas helps establish and embolden a window far beyond the scale of its walls — that is, the digital fenêtre of the screen, the site of swarming individuals increasingly overloaded by information and disconnected from real- world tangibility.[16] Suspicious of privacy, this digital window demands exposure. Pursuant of honest disambiguation, its transparency homogenizes. And absent truth, its apparent clarity reveals surveillance. But, as Han writes, “More information and communication alone do not illuminate the world” and “Hyperinformation and hypercommunication bring no light into darkness.”[17] Supportive of an ideology to which it does not itself subscribe, Warnecke’s Long Lines building is in many ways a testimonial to opacity’s power; a fortification against the outside world, behind its obfuscation lies possibility, however pernicious or benign.
“Long distance puts you where your thoughts are.”
Almost one hundred years from its writing, philosopher Walter Benjamin’s assessment of the demanding, intrusive, and consumptive power of the telephone rings truer than ever. “There was nothing to allay the violence with which it pierced me,” he writes. “Powerless, I suffered, seeing that it obliterated my sense of time, my firm resolve, my sense of duty. And just as the medium obeys the voice that takes possession of him from beyond the grave, I submitted to the first proposal that came my way through the telephone.”[18] Bearing in mind the breadth of opacity’s agency, we would do well to close the window.
“We are the unseen.”
[1] Like the cross talk of telephone network outages in the years of 33 Thomas Street’s construction — when electromechanically misconnected and misdirected calls, physical “party lines,” and improper wiring saw strangers share the same space of transmission — the “crossed lines” of this and the following interjections are the voice of the monopolistic Ma Bell (AT&T) and its competitors. Scraped from newspaper, magazine, television, and other advertising formats, they constitute an attempt at another kind of data collection or intelligence gathering. As AT&T describes in a future- facing internal document in 1969, “The pulses of one message are interwoven with pulses of other messages to get maximum use out of each line.” See: AT&T, “Looking Ahead,” in Long Lines: The Bell System Unit For Nationwide and Worldwide Communications (1969)
[2] William White, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Anchor Books/ Doubleday), 224–25. As will be explained later, 33 Thomas is less wall than dense mass.
[3] AKA “Project X” (to the architects during design and planning); AT&T Long Lines (to architectural history); Long Lines Equipment Building or 323 Broadway Building (to internal AT&T documents); 7 Thomas Street (to the Department of Buildings); and Titanpointe (to the National Security Administration).
[4] Notably, the frontispiece to Le Corbusier’s English edition of Towards a New Architecture.
[5] Out of place, as will become clear later, both for its departure from the logic as well as material of the building and for its purposelessness. After all, what use is an awning fit for a hotel at a building with next to no occupants?
[6] “Designed for machines but mindful of people,” Architectural Record (July 1969): 126–130.
[7] And, it was claimed, dust as well as light. The speciousness of their reasoning warrants their omission.
[8] J. W. Foss and R. W. Mayo, “Operation Survival,” Bell Laboratories Record (August 1969): 41–43.
[9] A January 1974 handbook from AT&T’s Long Lines Department on “Plans for Survivable Communications” confirms that the principal concern of a switching building in an urban environment is not its ability to “withstand collateral damage from a nuclear blast… [but] that protection against radioactive fallout be available for personnel who must remain there to operate essential communications equipment… for a period of about two weeks.” Reproduced on the handbook’s last page is a figure of a “Long Lines building in a large city”: a hand-rendered perspective of Warnecke’s Long Lines.
[10] American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Bell Systems Practices, Long Lines Department, “Shelter Operation and Supplies,” Section 002-501-909 LL, Issue A (March 1971).
[11] Addison Godel, “When Windows Were Wires: The Projection of Network Invulnerability and the Architecture of AT&T Long Lines,” Grey Room 61 (Fall 2015): 34–65.
[12] John Carl Warnecke and Associates Project Brief, Warnecke Architectural Archives, Healdsburg, California, 1967–68. Quoted in Zach Mortice, “Apocalypse- Proof,” Places Journal, September 2023.
[13] Ryan Gallagher and Henrik Moltke, “Titanpointe: The NSA’s Soy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain Sight,” The Intercept, November 15, 2016.
[14] “Secretary of War [Edwin] Stanton sat in his office in Washington,” reads a turn-of-the-century AT&T ad. “‘If I ring that bell,’ he said, ‘any man in the most distant State, is a prisoner of war?’… The telephone bell has succeeded the messenger bell. Business has succeeded war.” Managing the Union efforts for most of the Civil War, Stanton is said to have installed bells into the various rooms of War Department offices in Washington, DC. When he wanted to call a general — to arrest citizens resisting military services or supporting armistice as well as to try opponents via tribunal — he simply pulled a cord. A harrowing precursor, it may be said, to the weaponization of communications technology to come, and to the extrajudicial “dragnets” of America’s present leadership. See: Gamaliel Bradford, “Union Portraits: V. Edwin M. Stanton,” The Atlantic (August 1915): 183.
[15] Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Bulter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
[16] Byung-Chul Han, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2022). See also: Byung- Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
[17] Han, The Transparency Society, 41.
[18] Walter Benjamin, “The Telephone,” in The Work of Art in the Age of it Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 77–78.
