Apocalypse Proof: 33 Thomas Street in New York City

https://placesjournal.org/article/33-thomas-street-and-conspiracy-thrillers/

by klelatti • 3 years ago

136 72 3 years ago

placesjournal.org

baz002• 3 years ago

Definitely not apocalypse proof. Apocalypse resistant!

It's on my bucket list seeing that though.

throwbadubadu• 3 years ago

Why not, not getting it? (e.g. bulletproof also doesn't mean can withstand any bullet?)

hermitdev• 3 years ago

Apocalypses are like idiots. As soon as you make something idiot proof, the world tosses a bigger idiot at it.

smath2• 3 years ago

Ha, I used to work inside this building in 2010.

tiku• 3 years ago

Usually this is followed by some cool stories.....

baz002• 3 years ago

Or silence.

qingcharles• 3 years ago

And that's the story of how nobody heard from smath ever again.

iworshipfaangs2• 3 years ago

Did you like working there?

cscheid3• 3 years 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.

realo• 3 years ago

Surely you have a nice proof but it is too large to write in the margin ... :)

bliteben• 3 years ago

i hope this isn't his last post

cscheid3• 3 years ago

Hey, same! (From ~2012 to 2014), but yeah.

smath2• 3 years ago

Hey 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

swader999• 3 years ago

He Mike! How are you doing?

bombcar• 3 years ago

I 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.

kmeisthax2• 3 years ago

Conspiracy 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

bleuchase2• 3 years ago

And what about all of the “conspiracy theories” that have turned out to be partially or totally true? Were those just lucky guesses?

RetroTechie• 3 years ago

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean there's no conspiracy. ;-)

(with "you" I'm not referring to any poster here. Just generic paranoid person)

erulabs• 3 years ago

No group of people thinks any way. Groups can’t think - only individuals can. Any statement like “group does X” is categorically incorrect.

guilhas• 3 years ago

Not Mr Robot proof

shrubble• 3 years ago

In 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• 3 years ago

Reminds me of 611 Folsom in sf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/611_Folsom_Street

kouru225• 3 years ago

I 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.

B1FF_PSUVM• 3 years 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 ). The name seems to come from an 1863 English book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water-Babies,_A_Fairy_Tale... )

WarOnPrivacy• 3 years ago

More inside/outside pics

https://atlasofplaces.com/architecture/long-lines-building/

motohagiography• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

TPC: The President's Analyst, 1967

Arcanum-XIII• 3 years ago

You 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• 3 years ago

This building inspired the "Oldest House" in the game Control:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/the-real-buildings-that-in...

klipklop• 3 years ago

Control was a fantastic game. A must play.

wkat42427• 3 years ago

I thought the gameplay was so weird with all those black blocks. I didn't get past the first 30 minutes, I just got so bored. I was expecting a mystery game with a complex story.

Maybe I should give it another try.

tedunangst• 3 years ago

Do floods count as apocalypse? How well does the building work submerged?

lr1970• 3 years ago

Intercept 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-...

staplung• 3 years ago

Apocalypse 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• 3 years ago

This thing probably has extensive underground levels as well.

appplication• 3 years ago

I 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.

wkat42427• 3 years ago

I 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?

arethuza• 3 years ago

The Soviets had a SS-18 mod with a single large warhead (20 or 25Mt) that was presumably intended for targets like Cheyenne and Raven Rock mountains.

Maybe the Deep Underground Command Center if that had been built might have survived that kind of strike:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Underground_Command_Cente...

Alex3917• 3 years ago

IIRC the PSAC II building, also in NYC, is designed so that someone can fly a plane into it without anyone inside really noticing.

wkat42427• 3 years ago

Well the twin towers were also supposed to withstand an airplane collision.

Which in fact they did, but they didn't withstand the heat from the fire afterwards.

I kinda doubt this kind of statement since then.

rvba• 3 years ago

How 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?

danielvaughn2• 3 years ago

I'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).

wkat42427• 3 years ago

What 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.

danielvaughn2• 3 years ago

The 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.

krapp2• 3 years ago

Apocalypse 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• 3 years ago

Being worked these for sometime, I can tell you it is actually quite a good office.

llsf• 3 years ago

Paris 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• 3 years ago

It 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• 3 years ago

In stark contrast, the beautiful Bell Central Office of Minneapolis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_Technologies_Building

Apocalypse Proof: 33 Thomas Street in New York City

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