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The AT&T Long Lines Building it’s a completely skyscraper no windows which is located in the center of New Yorkin the neighborhood of TriBeCa, at 33 Thomas Street, in Lower Manhattan. It is entirely made of concrete, is not accessible to the public and, given its imposing and suggestive appearance, has fueled, over time, various urban legends and conspiracy theories, especially in United States. It is actually a telephone exchange but, according to some people, the government uses it to spy on the private and institutional conversations of millions of people without their knowledge. But what is true in these rumors?
What is the purpose of the windowless skyscraper in New York?
People who, walking through the streets of New York, find themselves in front of this building are often left speechless: the building immediately stands out for its grandeur and menacing character – as well as for the fact that it doesn’t even have a window. The only openings, if we can call them that, are represented by large rectangular-shaped protrusions, which serve for ventilation, as well as obviously the entrance door, which is monitored. Just think that at night it becomes, in some ways, even more disturbing, since it doesn’t even have a light to illuminate it and therefore appears like a gigantic black monolith in the middle of the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Because the building at 33 Thomas Street is structured this way
The building is nothing but gigantic telephone exchangethe largest in the world at the time of its construction, where millions and millions of national and international telephone calls are still processed today. The building actually belongs to AT&Tan American company that is a telecommunications giant, and which at the time essentially held a monopoly on the sector.
The official name of the skyscraper is AT&T Long Lines Building, but you can also find it by the name of the address where it is located, 33 Thomas Streetas is the case with many other commercial buildings in the United States.
It was built between 1969 and 1974 by the architect John Carl Warnecke who opted for the so-called brutalist stylethat is, that architectural style characterized by a rough appearance and the extensive use of exposed concrete, which preferred the functionality of buildings rather than their beauty. The interior is also built in a particular way, since it had to house the typical machinery of a telephone dispatch center. The height between the floors is therefore greater than usual, approximately 5.5 metersand the floors are nice and sturdy to support the weight of servers and cables.
Where does the information about the windowless skyscraper come from?
Obviously someone managed to get in there. Not many people have been allowed to visit it – excluding those who work there – but they all said they had seen nothing but long corridors full of cables, rooms full of batteries and storage disks the size of washing machines. We point out that not all floors of the building have been visited, but it is quite certain that the scenes behind the doors are more or less the same. It is therefore clear that the building was not designed so much to house people, but machines.**
Why does it seem like an impregnable fortress?
To fully understand the reason for its appearance we must contextualize the historical moment in which it was built: it was the mid-sixties, in full Cold Waran era when infrastructure of this type was seen as strategic
gic and therefore to be protected. Even from a nuclear attack and its radiation.
That’s why there are no windows and the walls are so thick. Not only that: as can be seen from various images on the web, buildings of this type were also designed to contain inside them food supplies, emergency batteries, wastewater treatment systems and even decontamination showers.
The Long Lines Building in particular was designed to comfortably accommodate 1,500 people for two weeks in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. In reality, as it turned out later, the nuclear threat was not the only threat from which we needed to protect ourselves. Telephone exchanges are essential in all periods of crisis, even in the event of civil war for example, so the building in question was designed to defend itself also from American citizens themselves.
So, to recap: the building is a large telecommunications power plant, which still belongs to AT&T, which, although it has lost its monopoly on the sector in the meantime, still remains one of the most important in the United States. Some plans have instead been given for use by Verizonanother large company in the same sector.
What does the government have to do with the AT&T Long Lines Building?
Given the centrality of this building in the field of telecommunications, it is not surprising that relations with the United States government have always been rather close. A 2016 investigation conducted by the newspaper The Intercept raised a real fuss in this sense, accusing AT&T of allowing the NSA, the National Security Agencyto access very easily the data and communications that passed through its centers, including 33 Thomas Street.
The relationship between AT&T and the federal government is not a new story. Some of you will remember the story of Edward Snowdenthe former NSA collaborator who provided the press with several documents proving the collaboration t
between the National Security Agency and the Telecommunications Agency. In those documents, a hub known by the code name of was mentioned TITANPOINTEwhich according to the investigation, could just be our windowless skyscraper.
So is the government monitoring all calls in the country? No, this part still needs to be proven. AT&T has in fact defended itself by saying that it has never allowed any government agency to directly control its network, but that it has simply limited itself to obeying over the years some requests made with regular mandate.
What does it mean? Think for example of a kidnapping. In that case,
where a person’s life is in danger and there isn’t much time to intervene, the feds get the allowed to control a telephone line. But this is a strictly regulated procedure. The issue arising from Edward Snowden’s documents is, however, much more complex, because it seeks to raise the question of how far a government body can go in the name of national security.
In any case, no concrete evidence it came out of those documents
that demonstrates a physical presence of the NSA in the rooms of this skyscraper, or that demonstrates the direct involvement of AT&T, a private company, in international espionage events.
Certainly the more unique than rare aspect of the building, and the fact that it is closed to the public, has contributed to fueling these theories. Together with the fact that in some films and TV series it has actually been used as an external location for some spy agencies, I am thinking for example of some famous series such as Mr Robot or The X-Files.
