Its choice of location is nothing nefarious. It was built in the mid 1950s as a Pacific Northwest Bell telco central office, for phone lines serving downtown Seattle, in the days when dialtone rotary pulse-dial phone systems were the highest technology available. The PNW Bell phone system and its interconnections with the AT&T Long Lines system had some sites which were mutually shared with military AUTOVON and other federal government long distance telecom circuits (such as those which fed the giant SAGE installations at McChord and in Moses Lake).

It became a USWest site in 1984 through the breakup of the Bell monopoly system, and then Qwest and eventually Centurylink.