Apocalypse Proof: 33 Thomas Street in New York City | Hacker News Reader

Apocalypse Proof: 33 Thomas Street in New York City

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136 pointsklelatti72 comments

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 :)

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.

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.

TPC: The President's Analyst, 1967

"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... )

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

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

Control was a fantastic game. A must play.

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.

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.

This thing probably has extensive underground levels as well.

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.

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?

Remember these were the days of AUTOVON[0], so the answer to your question was probably “five star generals in other nuclear hardened bunkers”.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovon

I know, we had something similar in the Netherlands (in fact we still do). An independent phone network for the government.

But my point is: You can protect the building. What about the trunk lines going all the way to those other bunkers? They're not immune to nuclear blasts and in the days it matters they were made of copper which can catch EMP directly.

These days they will be fibre which is EMP immune of course but the repeaters are not.

Long Lines had a vast network of nuclear-hardened microwave towers spanning the lower 48 that predominantly carried network traffic. From the article, the vents in the building in Manhattan also disguised microwave feed horns. There was some coax in the network where there wasn’t line of sight linking two nodes, but that was the exception and came later in the network’s existence, I believe.

I’m not sure what EMP protections could have been applied to microwave equipment on the towers, but my assumption is that it might have been easier to defend against than a massive piece of coax in the ground as a big EMP inductor.

Wow that is pretty severe, I would imagine cables would be much easier to EMP shield, by laying them in grounded metal pipes. Because this has to be done for the entire length this is still a huge problem of course. And not really feasible over long distances.

But a microwave antenna (especially one that size) is basically one giant EMP collector :) It's pretty impossible to protect that. I guess if they did that, they would have just let the receivers blow and replace them later with spare parts shielded inside the building. You can't practically shield them from EMP because then they won't work anymore, and overdimensioning them so they could cope with the EMP would be almost impossible considering the huge gain of those antennas.

Ghostbusters?

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...

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

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.

That was still a really big deal. The terrorists expected the towers to collapse immediately on impact. Everyone who was in the towers that morning and didn't die was saved by the "airplane-proof" construction.

> The terrorists expected the towers to collapse immediately on impact.

Where do we know this from? We can't ask them about that.

I don't know if it was mentioned in the documents that were found. But either way, the "airplane-proof" design did save thousands of lives, even if it failed to save thousands more.

i'd bet on it for fission plant containment buildings

The WTC towers were constructed to withstand a 1970s jet (707, DC-8, etc) that was on approach to JFK/LGA, hence at low speed and not full of fuel. This was not the scenario on 9/11.

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.

More inside/outside pics

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

A 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.

I can't fathom how you could read the Church Committee report and describe the facts in it as "boring".

The definition of "conspiracy theorist" seems either pejorative or not, depending on who you ask. Why do you prefer to use it as a pejorative?

Abuses of government power are generally boring facts, like civil asset forfeiture. “A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy by powerful and sinister groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

So, when cops rob an armored car via civil asset forfeiture it’s just something that happened no conspiracy theory required because there isn’t some other example that fits. But, the moon landing was fake fits because there’s another explanation.

Occasionally what once was a conspiracy theory is now considered factual, but at that moment it stops being a conspiracy theory because it’s no longer fringe. As such this isn’t a pejorative definition as it doesn’t directly imply such theories are incorrect.

> Conspiracy theorists aren't going out on the streets protesting the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

I love a good No true Scotsman mixed with a twist of ad hominem.

In my experience, conspiracy theorists don't have a lot of interest in these. Unprovable conspiracy theories are more interesting because it affirms their sense of paranoia, identity, feeling special, entitlement to the truth.

Conspiracy theorists might go on and on about JFK or 9/11 or Pizzagate, but how often do you hear the conspiracy type obsess about Jan. 6, an actual proven conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States? The "proven" conspiracy theories they do care about, like MKUltra, are generally cast as far more consequential than most people would say they actually are.

> but how often do you hear the conspiracy type obsess about Jan. 6, an actual proven conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States?

Actually, they do. There are a lot of claims online saying it an FBI false flag operation, going so far as to name a specific person as an FBI plant.

That is technically an example, but I think it also proves OP's point. Faced with a clear, public, and well-understood conspiracy, the theorists can't accept the demonstrated facts. For the surface truth to be the actual truth is intensely unsatisfying and disempowering. There must be something more and deeper to it, always.

In many cases, yes. You'll often find the actual conspiracy that turned out to be true only had a tangential relation to (and few if any specific details in common with) what conspiracy theorists were talking about. Although the conspiracy theorists will always take credit for "being right all along."

And invariably, the actual conspiracy gets revealed by parties other than conspiracy theorists themselves, because the conspiracy theorists don't actually have insider knowledge, they're just doing the strings and thumbtacks thing and making guesses.

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)

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

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-...

Definitely not apocalypse proof. Apocalypse resistant!

It's on my bucket list seeing that though.

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

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

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

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

Or silence.

cool silence?

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

Did you like working there?

(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.

Is 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.

Not 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!

> 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.

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

i hope this isn't his last post

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

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

He Mike! How are you doing?

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?

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

You’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/

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"!

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

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

Not Mr Robot proof

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