30 Jan 2024 – Windowless skyscrapers and random numbers
Welcome to Outsider Art, a weekly newsletter about literature, history, and post-Cold War paranoia.
Windowless skyscrapers
At the opposite end of the architectural spectrum from the all-glass skyscrapers that have lately risen in Hudson Yards and Midtown Manhattan, are a collection of windowless towers built mostly in the 1960s and 1970s to house telecommunications equipment.
33 Thomas Street, pictured above, is the tallest, the best-known, and perhaps the most graceful. The interior is less exceptional: 2004 photos from the New York Post show racks of a equipment and a rather bland-looking “security research center”.
According to an AT&T spokesperson, the absence of windows aids in temperature control and protects against external threats, both natural and manmade.1 Newspaper accounts rarely fail to mention that it was built to withstand a nuclear blast.
Other New York City specimens include 375 Pearl Street, which looms over the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge,2 and 811 Tenth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. In the same genus is a low-rise communications center in Queens.
The Brutalist design of 33 Thomas Street and the others supplanted an earlier generation of Art Deco telecommunications hubs, including a landmark building at 140 West Street, 60 Hudson Street in Tribeca, and a tower on 17th Street in Chelsea – an appropriate metaphor for the onset of an age of mass surveillance. Indeed, The Intercept revealed in 2016 that 33 Thomas Street was the likely location of an NSA wire-tapping program that targeted an array of international organizations and foreign countries.
The Intercept article is full of tantalizing details:
Federal Communications Commission records confirm that 33 Thomas Street is the only location in New York City where AT&T has an FCC license for satellite earth stations.
He [John Carl Warnecke, the architect of 33 Thomas Street] also helped construct a new embassy complex in Washington for the Soviet Union, in which the Soviets claimed they found eavesdropping equipment embedded in the walls.
Some of Warnecke’s original architectural drawings for 33 Thomas Street are labeled “Project X.”
His plans describe the structure as “a skyscraper to be inhabited by machines” …
The blueprints for the building show that it was to include three subterranean levels, including a cable vault, where telecommunications cables likely entered and exited the building from under Manhattan’s bustling streets.
In my opinion, all skyscrapers should be windowless, like the Pyramids.
Links from the archives
A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates – a book which delivers exactly what the title promises. Highlights include 97699, 12104 (my personal favorite), and 75506.
Big Muskie – an enormous mobile piece of coal mining equipment. The Wikipedia article is complete with photographs of the machine from the 1970s that make it look like the antagonist in a horror movie.
Quote of the week
I felt as if a strange error had brought me into the landscape of someone else's nightmare. I couldn't grasp that this was actually happening. It was indeed a nightmare, but only later did I come to realize that it was just the beginning of a nightmare of enormous proportions.
From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (p. 153)
“30 Flrs., No Vu” from the “FYI” section of The New York Times, 4 December 1994.
A renovation in the 2010s replaced part of the blank façade with a glass curtain wall.