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Apocalypse Proof: 33 Thomas Street in New York City
- baz00 3y agoDefinitely not apocalypse proof. Apocalypse resistant! It's on my bucket list seeing that though.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoWhy not, not getting it? (e.g. bulletproof also doesn't mean can withstand any bullet?)
- hermitdev 3y agoApocalypses are like idiots. As soon as you make something idiot proof, the world tosses a bigger idiot at it.
- smath 3y agoHa, I used to work inside this building in 2010.
- tiku 3y agoUsually this is followed by some cool stories.....
- baz00 3y agoOr silence.
- micah94 3y agocool silence?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 3y agoAnd that's the story of how nobody heard from smath ever again.
- iworshipfaangs2 3y agoDid you like working there?
- cscheid 3y ago(Not parent, but also worked there for about 2 years) The no-window thing is real and freaks people out, but each floor is very tall and the interior was open enough that it didn't feel claustrophobic. You're also in a zipcode that is in contention for "best in the world for whatever-you-might-want-to-do". If you ever got claustrophobic, a walk around tribeca usually would cure you of that real quick-like.
- wkat4242 3y agoIs the art deco inside as beautiful as cracked up to be? Ps I also worked in a phone exchange building. Cool thing was that there were half floors. 1, 1 1/2, 2, 2 1/2 etc. These floors were in fact half height like in the movie Being John Malkovich. Except there were no offices, they were used to route the huge cable trunks between floors and rooms. These days with single fibers replacing thousands of cable pairs I'm sure they're a lot more roomy than they were back then.
- fourthark 3y agoNot in this one; 33 Thomas is later than the buildings you are thinking of. You'd want to glance inside ex-AT&T 32 Ave of Americas for the full art deco. That's a great story about the half floors!
- cscheid 3y ago> These days with single fibers replacing thousands of cable pairs I'm sure they're a lot more roomy than they were back then. That's how I ended up working there. 33T used to be packed full of gear but everything shrank so much that AT&T found themselves with dozens of empty floors. They didn't renew a lease on a big NJ lab I worked on, and a number of us ended up being able to choose commuting to NYC.
- realo 3y agoSurely you have a nice proof but it is too large to write in the margin ... :)
- bliteben 3y agoi hope this isn't his last post
- cscheid 3y agoHey, same! (From ~2012 to 2014), but yeah.
- smath 3y agoHey Carlos, I remember you (nanocubes!!). I was in the security research group. Re stories: — the building has a well!! — apparently it is well stocked with enough food for a month for 20-30 ppl. I never independently verified this. — lots of tourists would walk up to the front entrance and try to poke around — yes no windows. My group tried to install screens in the office with feeds from cameras pointing outside - we were told it had 6 ft thick walls to withstand nuclear radiation
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- swader999 3y agoHe Mike! How are you doing?
- bombcar 3y agoI feel this building would be a much better conspiracy target if they had done then normal thing of making it look like a building; one with fake windows that nobody ever goes in - or comes out.
- kmeisthax 3y agoConspiracy theorists don't think that way. They want things that validate their paranoia, so they look for symbols that are obvious to them, but discarded by others because they're too obvious and stupid. They want buildings that look like Hollywood evil lairs. They want barcodes and IC cards that spell out 666[0] if you squint at them funny. They see Linux error screens with the words "kill process or sacrifice child" in them and think their Fire Stick is extracting adrenochrome at the basement of Comet Ping-Pong[1]. They aren't entirely insane, they are onto something. But, ironically, they have been programmed by business interests to ignore their own malfeasance. So the story can't just be "the government suspended monopoly laws and let everyone buy everyone and that's why everything sucks now, join a union". After all, a lot of these people were born and raised to oppose regulation and unions. So they instead have to construct a new framework for opposing business to get rid of that cognitive dissonance, and it invariably becomes this over-dramatized nonsense. [0] A codeword referring to Nero, a politically unpopular Roman emperor that has been dead for over a thousand years [1] A pizza place that does not have a basement, but that hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from shooting them up and holding them hostage anyway
- bleuchase 3y agoAnd what about all of the “conspiracy theories” that have turned out to be partially or totally true? Were those just lucky guesses?
- suction 3y ago[dead]
- kmeisthax 3y agoA conspiracy theory proven true is no longer a conspiracy theory, it is a boring fact. Conspiracy theorists aren't going out on the streets protesting the gradual erosion of civil liberties. They're calling that a limited hangout and demanding the real juicy shit, even if it doesn't exist.
- guilhas 3y agoNot Mr Robot proof
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- shrubble 3y agoIn the 1960s the riots in cities led to the requirement of 'no windows' and datacenters were not to share walls with the exterior walls, so that breaching a datacenter required going through 2 walls. These requirements no doubt play a large factor in the building's design.
- dkasper 3y agoReminds me of 611 Folsom in sf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/611_Folsom_Street https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/611_Folsom_Street
- kouru225 3y agoI walk by this all the time. There’s a big glass entrance on one side with a doorman and everything so it’s not exactly one giant slab on concrete.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago"In an eighteen-month period in 1971 and ’72, the FBI counted an astounding (and almost entirely forgotten) 2,500 domestic bombings: roughly five a day." SF author John Brunner had a contemporaneous story, reflecting that, titled The Inception of the Epoch of Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid (https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?66700 https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?66700 ). The name seems to come from an 1863 English book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water-Babies,_A_Fairy_Tale_for_a_Land_Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water-Babies,_A_Fairy_Tale... )
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoMore inside/outside pics https://atlasofplaces.com/architecture/long-lines-building/ https://atlasofplaces.com/architecture/long-lines-building/
- motohagiography 3y agoThe history of this building in the 70s and 80s puts the official paranoia behind phreaking and hacking in more context. When you see that this building is as much a key symbol that represents power as it is a single fully functional and modular switching machine - and where it stands in the middle of the center of the world economy and american supremacy - to hack what this indestructable concrete obelisk represented was a real threat to the projection of power. If The Phone Company was vulnerable to some rogue geniuses, everything else was up for grabs.
- euroderf 3y agoTPC: The President's Analyst, 1967
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- Arcanum-XIII 3y agoYou have to be honest: that's the perfect architecture to create paranoia. As usual, it doesn't mean it's Evil. But it's perfect to create story since it's "mysterious"!
- didsomeonesay 3y agoThis building inspired the "Oldest House" in the game Control: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/the-real-buildings-that-inspired-i-control-i-s-oldest-house https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/the-real-buildings-that-in...
- tedunangst 3y agoDo floods count as apocalypse? How well does the building work submerged?
- lr1970 3y agoIntercept was the first to claim back in 2016 that this building has had a deep NSA connection [1]. Fascinating story... [1] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...
- staplung 3y agoApocalypse proof? We need something like an IPX scale. Maybe this is like AP5: able to withstand small-arms fire, molotov cocktails and, I dunno, zombie mandibles? But not cruise missiles, direct artillery fire, or giant transforming robots. Making something "nuclear hardened" is evidently not as high a bar as one might suppose. Setting aside that I don't know of any actual standards it appears that what's required is an ability to withstand a certain overpressure and provide some amount of radiation shielding. A windowless, reinforced concrete building would do pretty nicely without even trying for extra credit. I guess the idea being that nuclear-proof is impossible for normal, baryonic matter: a near enough blast from a big enough bomb will vaporize anything.
- chrisco255 3y agoThis thing probably has extensive underground levels as well.
- appplication 3y agoI have worked in a number of nuclear hardened facilities. Some more than others. There certainly are robust standards for this, as I recall quite a bit of fuss around even the small details. Typically what you see is everything is electrically isolated. On-site power, EMP hardened with shielding everywhere. All mechanical and electrical equipment suspended. Several feet of concrete on all sides. They told us it was intended to withstand near impact and I believed that it could. At least structurally. I’m not sure the people inside would fare the same. I also spent some time inside Cheyenne mountain. That is next level hardening. I have no doubt you could hit it with 50 nukes and the people inside would hardly notice. Of course, other than it specifically being their job to know that we’re being nuked.
- wkat4242 3y agoI wonder what the point is in nuclear hardened telecoms exchanges though. Sure it and its equipment might survive but everything around it will be fried by the blast and its EMP. So who you're gonna call?
- rvba 3y agoHow do those microwave transmitter lines work? Do they need to be empty from station to station? Does a bird flying break the connection? Would a drone block it? I read the high frequency trading firms use own towers to transmit messages. Could a rogue competitor fly a drone/kite to "block the view" and break the connections?
- danielvaughn 3y agoI'm surprised there are more conspiracies about this than the facades you can find walking around Manhattan. I remember stumbling upon one without knowing what they were, and being rather confused (and suspicious).
- wkat4242 3y agoWhat facades? Edit: Ah I found them online. Those are built not to be noticed though. I can imagine they don't attract so much attention. This AT&T building is a pretty cool piece of mysterious brutalist architecture. It's noticable and leads to wonder about what's inside. And infamous because it was (is?) home to an NSA monitoring installation exposed in some leaks. It was also featured in media like the Mr Robot series.
- danielvaughn 3y agoThe facades are really obvious if you're walking by them, and they're super creepy if you don't know what they are. Not to say that the AT&T building isn't creepy - I've walked by it a few times and it always made me laugh a little at how ridiculously evil it looks.
- ciabattabread 3y agoYou’re talking about buildings that hide subway ventilation shafts and power substations[1]. People would rather live next to creepy than ugly. [1] https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/ https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/
- krapp 3y agoApocalypse proof? This building looks like it instigates the apocalypse. Like it sucks the souls out of people to feed some ancient eldritch horror bound in a Masonic pentagram underground. Like there's got to be a boss fight on top of it.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoBeing worked these for sometime, I can tell you it is actually quite a good office.
- llsf 3y agoParis decided instead to go underground for the atomic bomb proof telecom hub. Well, unless they moved it in the past 25 years (i.e. last time I worked in there). It was equally dystopian, with offices with fake windows + artificial light + window treatments, a square with bistro tables to hang out. I remember being slightly warmer than a normal office building. I guess the AC was either not properly sized, or just running at the minimum as barely anyone was working there actively at the time. But the cool factor, was how we accessed it from the ground. There was a little structure that looked like the toilet structure for the adjacent park. You buzz, the door unlock, you enter, there is a guy behind a glass door, you show ID, and he unlock the elevator, and you go down to your subterranean floor. Felt like Jame Bond :)
- Faaak 3y agoIt is the same in Geneva as the telecom "room" is underground somewhere in the city where everybody goes but nobody notices. You also access it via a nondescript small "hut". Good memories indeed.
- rsync 3y agoIn stark contrast, the beautiful Bell Central Office of Minneapolis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_Technologies_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_Technologies_Building