Here at 60 Hudson Street, all the overlap in companies somewhat but not fully explains the fact that AT&T has conveniently taken ConEd and Hugh Okane traffic cones and spray painted AT&T on them!īurrington also points out other objects on the streets we ordinarily just walk by. There’s also clearly some kind of project going on that requires a significant amount of resources, as there are two mobile generators parked alongside 60 Hudson Street and cables running literally into and out of openings in the building. The connections here have influenced the more recent transformation of 60 Hudson Street into a carrier hotel.Ĭompanies rent space at 60 Hudson Street, run their cables underground, and access the network in the AT&T Building – a “convenient hack,” describes Burrington, “without having to negotiate anything with AT&T.” There’s a rumor that the first location that overseas signals travel after arriving in the New York City region is 60 Hudson Street, making it a major switching point. Built around the same time as the AT&T Building,60 Hudson Street has conduits that connect the two buildings underground because there was once a significant amount of shared business between the two companies. The Western Union Telegraph Building at 60 Hudson Street is within eyesight distance of the AT&T Building. In fact, dead wires are often left there to prevent other companies from taking the space.

Underground, the ducts get pretty crowded and there’s a battle between operators for space – just like there is above ground in the world of real estate. Today, Empire City Subway exists as a subsidiary under Verizon and the New York Telephone Company became a company called Verizon New York – “so technically you have to go through Verizon to put any new fiberoptic cable underground in New York City,” says Burrington. The New York Telephone Company was responsible for the other boroughs. ECS was created with a mandate to build underground ducts for telecommunication services in Manhattan and the Bronx and later became majority owned by Bell. The manholes here contain the letters ECS, Empire City Subway, formed after the Great Blizzard of 1888 which took down much of the city’s overhead electrical infrastructure. Sometimes you’ll see a cluster of certain types of manhole covers, which we came across along Hudson Street, which are giveaways for potentially deep and complex telecommunications operations below ground. ” Another example of the mergers and acquisitions within the industry. Manhole covers often remain long after companies are swallowed up by other ones or go out of business. The ConEd Telecom manholes just outside the AT&T building are remnants of a parallel fiber network built by ConEd that “didn’t really work,” she says, “ConEd resold the network to RCN Metro Network division, which eventually became Lighttower.

Manhole covers also abound nearby, which are another subject of Burrington’s book.

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