Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

by Andrew Blum

  One evening a few weeks later, this new link would be “turned up.” Its fibers would be spliced into their mates inside 55 Broadway’s basement and hooked up to the proper light-emitting equipment—thereby increasing by the slightest increment the total accumulation of tiny illuminated tubes beneath lower Manhattan.

  111 Eighth Avenue wasn’t the only big Internet building in Manhattan, but it was the newest. The other two major ones—60 Hudson Street and 32 Avenue of the Americas—had a longer history as telecommunications hubs. But all three shared a defining characteristic: the fiber beneath the street was as important in their creation as the equipment in their towers. But the reason why had nothing to do with Google. It went back to a June night a hundred years ago.

  “Without a single hitch the intricate task of transferring all the telegraph lines from the old building at 195 Broadway to its new quarters at 24 Walker Street was accomplished by the Western Union early yesterday morning,” the New York Times reported on June 29, 1914. This brand-new operations building at the corner of Walker Street and Sixth Avenue—today known as 32 Avenue of the Americas—was to be shared between Western Union and AT&T, with AT&T occupying the first twelve floors and the top five belonging to Western Union. (It’s worth pointing out here that the second “T” in “AT&T” stands for telegraph.) “When business is in full swing today 1,500 operators who have been working the sounding keys at 195 Broadway will be enjoying the conveniences of the most modern telegraph plant in the world,” crowed the Times. By 1919, the building was among the nation’s largest long-distance telephone central offices, with 1,470 switchboard test positions, 2,200 long-distance lines, and a transatlantic radio-telephone switchboard—all of which still wasn’t sufficient to serve the country’s telecommunications needs. Today, the building is one of the key pieces of New York’s Internet—even if AT&T and Western Union’s cohabitation didn’t last.

  In 1928, Western Union hired the architectural firm of Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker to design a brand-new twenty-four-story building of its own, three blocks south at 60 Hudson Street. Not to be shown up, AT&T hired the same architects to expand the old building to fill the entire block, as a new AT&T “long lines” headquarters. Undeterred by the stock market crash, the telecommunications rivals built matching art deco palaces, each with gymnasium, library, training school, even dormitories. The key to their separation lay beneath Church Street: an extensive run of clay conduits, filled with heavy-gauge copper wires that carried messages between the two systems—a sort of proto-Internet that would one day serve the real Internet. Both buildings were in full use until the 1960s, when the telegraph’s decline eroded 60 Hudson’s importance as a telecommunications hub.

  But it wasn’t the end for the building—and certainly not the end for the tubes under Church Street. Sixty Hudson’s reinvention came with the deregulation of the phone industry, as AT&T’s monopoly was chipped away by the federal courts. Western Union had vacated the building in 1973 but retained the rights to its “network”—most notably, the ducts leading back to AT&T. The former monopoly was being forced by the courts to allow competitors to connect to its system—but that didn’t mean they had to provide the real estate to do it. It took William McGowan, founder and chairman of MCI—the fast-moving communications company that drove the fight for deregulation and would soon operate one of the first Internet backbones—to find a way. Discovering the unused conduits between the old buildings, he struck a deal for their use and established a beachhead inside 60 Hudson, with direct links to the basement of 32 Avenue of the Americas. The other competitive telephone carriers rushed into 60 Hudson after him, filling up the old telegraph floors one by one. Inevitably, those networks began to connect to one another inside the building, and 60 Hudson evolved into a hub. It’s the paradox of the Internet again: the elimination of distance only happens if the networks are in the same place. “It’s physical. It’s proximity. It’s the address,” said Hunter Newby, an executive who’d helped make 60 Hudson a major Internet building.

  Today, 60 Hudson is home to more than four hundred networks—that same number, and mostly the same networks, familiar from the other biggies. But a half dozen of these networks are of particular importance: the transatlantic undersea cables, which land at various points along the Long Island and New Jersey coasts, and then “home run” to 60 Hudson, where they connect with each other and everyone else. Astonishingly, the majority of them come from the exact same place: a building in London named Telehouse. Having so many of them in those two buildings wasn’t planned and probably isn’t prudent. But it does make sense, for the same reason international flights all land at JFK. “There’s a recurring theme here: people go to where things are,” Newby reminded me. Each network had its own equipment scattered around 60 Hudson in cages and suites of various sizes, but many of the ceiling-mounted fiber conduits come together at just a few places, known as meet-me rooms, operated by a company named Telx, a key competitor of Equinix. The largest meet-me room was on the ninth floor. It happened to have an excellent view, toward the AT&T building, four blocks uptown. Although the view wasn’t the point. It was the path underground that mattered. These two buildings existed—they were the Internet—because of that link. I wanted to see it up close.

  It was a hot day in the middle of summer when I met John Gilbert in the barrel-vaulted lobby of 32 Avenue of the Americas. Gilbert is chief operating officer of Rudin Management, the great family-owned New York City real estate company that in 1999 became only the second owner, after AT&T, of 32 Avenue of the Americas. He was an imposing figure in crisp white shirtsleeves and silk power tie—a startling change from the network engineers in their hoodies. He stood beneath a lobby mosaic: an ocher-tinged Mercator projection beneath which is written the building’s motto: “Telephone wires and radio unite to make neighbors of nations.” “Why is radio in there?” Gilbert asked rhetorically, still gripping my hand. “When this building opened, there were no transatlantic telephone cables, only radios on buoys. Then, in 1955, this was built.” He handed me a palm-sized copper cylinder, like a bloated penny, remarkably heavy and dense: a souvenir cut of the very first transatlantic telephone cable, called TAT-1, that connected the United States by wire to Europe for the first time. It ran from New York—from this building—to London, but the undersea portion itself stretched from Newfoundland to Oban, Scotland. Gilbert’s grandfather designed it. As an engineer at Bell Labs, J. J. Gilbert wrote the specifications for “a submarine telephone cable with submerged repeaters.” Gilbert kept the slice of cable on his desk, a totem to the physicality of telecommunications and his role as a keeper of it.

  Since Rudin bought the place for $140 million Gilbert has been responsible for the building’s continuing use as a communications hub, learning the peculiar needs of the business, and renovating the building to attract the new wave of Internet companies. In the beginning, his family connection to the building was a coincidence, but it soon fixed his role as the keeper of this place’s history, from the telephone operators who first filled its floors to the huge fiber-optic distribution racks that do the same work today.

  But in the decade after the Rudins bought it, 32 Avenue of the Americas evolved into a different animal from its sister building. At 60 Hudson, dozens of companies lease and sublease space for their equipment. But at 32 Avenue of the Americas, the Rudins both own the entire building and operate the telecommunications space, which they’ve named “The Hub.” Elsewhere in the building are the offices of an architect, advertising agencies, and Cambridge University Press. But on the twenty-fourth floor is the Internet.

  The “meet-me room” here was more of a “meet-me aisle,” a single seventy-foot run of sixty-four racks, all filled floor to ceiling with looping yellow fibers, like a giant loom, accommodating tens of thousands of individual links. Gilbert led me gingerly around a maintenance guy high up on a ladder stringing new cables through the overhead trays—a more delicate process than I’d seen on the street outside. “This i
s your modern marketplace, where handoffs are made, fiber touches fiber, networks touch other networks,” Gilbert said, as if showing off the marble bathroom of a Park Avenue co-op. In that way, the building isn’t so different from Ashburn or Palo Alto—other than the fact that it is in this space that AT&T connected long-distance phone calls for half a century.

  If Ashburn is a fluke of geography, this building is the opposite: a fact of geography. It was built upon hundred-year-old telephone infrastructure, nestled between stock exchanges and railroad tracks. It was wedged into the most natural piece of real estate at the elbow of the city’s downtown and the first way out of town—the Holland Tunnel, to New Jersey and points west. And unlike the intentional sameness of the Equinixes of the digital world, its design is singular, its ways quirky and mysterious. It seemed to have evolved organically, as if compelled by its surroundings—feeding off its original root system of conduits and extending new ones over time.

  Recently, a company named Azurro HD had moved in, taking advantage of the building’s incredible abundance of bandwidth to help television broadcasters electronically transfer large quantities of video, rather than overnighting physical tapes. The company’s small room was manned around the clock, and when we walked in to say hello, the technician on duty had a movie up on his enormous bank of mission-control-style screens: the 1975 espionage thriller Three Days of the Condor. Standing there inside one of the world’s great “nexuses of information,” we all watched for a long moment as the CIA agent played by Robert Redford tiptoed across the plaza of the World Trade Center towers.

  Out in the elevator lobby, Gilbert opened a hinged steel door where the sliding elevator door should have been. Behind it was an open shaft crossed by a grated platform, with waist-high railings made of thin pipes. We stepped out onto it, so that below us were twenty-five stories of darkness—ignoring, of course, the hidden light inside the thousands of illuminated fibers. The wall of the shaft was lined with steel conduits and the plastic tubing known as innerduct—some orange, red, or dirty white, occasionally sliced open to reveal thick black cables tied neatly together in clumps. Networks that want to put in a new cable were required to protect it inside innerduct, but most opted for an extra layer of steel. The cables arched away from their vertical paths to join the ceiling fiber trays running above the data center space, as if a highway exit ramp were turned up into the air.

  Gilbert and I then headed toward the basement—to the place where MCI breached AT&T’s fortress. I lost track of how many doors we went through, but it was at least a half dozen by the time he moved an orange safety cone to the side, selected the right key from a massive chain, and opened an unmarked door. When the lights flickered on, I saw a grand room, like a walk-in closet for giants. The high ceiling ended in a ledge near the street wall, the kind of place a child might turn into a loft. The fiber-optic cables beneath the street traverse the building foundation through a special tube called the “point of entry.” In the category of unique and expensive New York City real estate—$800 per month parking spaces, two-hundred-square-foot studios—these short pipes are high on the list of the strangest, and most expensive. In the early days of the big fiber-optic builds, meaning the mid-1990s, landlords hardly noticed them, approving requests to bring in new cables as needed. But as networks proliferated in buildings like this one, they increasingly clued into their value. Gilbert wouldn’t specify, but I’d heard $100,000 a year wasn’t unheard of—for a distance the span of your arms.

  “When we first bought the building, the whole room was full of cables with these tags on them—Des Moines, Chicago—they went nonstop home run to those cities. We should have saved a couple of them,” he said wistfully. Instead they employed three men to come in every day and cut away at the old cables, testing and checking each one to make sure it wasn’t still filled with telephone calls before they removed it. It took the three of them two years to strip the room back to a state of emptiness, its cinder-block walls then repainted the same industrial gray paint as basements everywhere. Then the new fiber came.

  I looked up at the spot where the ceiling met the wall. A massive twisted heap of black cables labeled with thick paper tags attached with twisted wires sprang down from above. There were steel cylinders and heavy-duty plastic fiber junction boxes, all tangled around one another like twine as they poured down from beneath the street. Some looped around each other, leaving bits of slack that could be sliced and spliced as needed. Other cables were thick and unbendable. Along one wall, vertical metal racks were installed to support additional cables that ran down the wall in neat rows, like garden hoses. If the equivalent room in Ashburn had all the intrinsic character of a mall bathroom, this room’s strange shape revealed its long history, its building and rebuilding, the flitting ghosts of a century’s phone calls, and the remnant of ten thousand nights of labor on the street above. It reminded me how much the Internet’s physical presence was defined by the spaces between—whether inside the routers, or at the building point of entry.

  I’ve been to a lot of secret places in New York, but few had that kind of presence. Partly it was the mysterious way we’d arrived there—past the subway entrance, up a few steps, down a few steps, through yet another door, one marked, another not, keys jangling, greeted by the rumble of a subway train and the flickering of the lights, then the slight tension in the air as Gilbert wondered what exactly it was I wanted to see here—and if it was really such a good idea showing it to me. But mostly what excited me was what I saw—or really imagined—in that huge cascade of thick cables: an incomprehensible lot of all the innumerable things we send over wires. Again, I realized that the words we use to describe “telecommunications” don’t do justice to their current relevance to our lives, and certainly not to their corporeal presence. But it wasn’t, again, a moment to linger. We had been in the room hardly forty-five seconds when Gilbert stepped back to the door and put his finger on the light switch. “So that’s basically it,” he said, and the light went out.

  Considered at a certain scale, just beyond the foundation wall at 32 Avenue of the Americas were the conduits beneath the streets. It was one of those mysterious corners of Lower Manhattan that seem to peculiarly exist in the z-dimension—where crooked passageways led to barbershops, lost in both time and space. Following the tiled walls at odd angles, hearing a subway train just around the corner, you could never tell how deep you were in the bowels of the city, as if the world beneath the streets went on forever. But in the time you spent wandering, even if only for a minute, a much longer journey could have happened, many times over. Because looked at another way, just beyond the foundation wall at 32 Avenue of the Americas was London.

  According to TeleGeography, the most heavily trafficked international Internet route is between New York and London, as if the cities were the two ends of the Internet’s brightest tube of light. For the Internet, as for so much else, London is the hinge between east and west, the place where the networks reaching across the Atlantic link up with those extending from Europe, from Africa and India. A bit from Mumbai to Chicago will go through London and then New York, as will one from Madrid to São Paulo and Lagos to Dallas. The cities’ enjoined gravity pulls in the light, as it pulls in so much else.

  But despite that, the Internet’s physical manifestation in the two cities is completely different. I had started out with the assumption that London is the old world and New York the new. But with the Internet, the opposite turned out to be true. If in Amsterdam the Internet was hidden away in low industrial buildings on the city’s ragged edges, and in New York it colonized art deco palaces, in London it formed a single, concentrated, self-contained district—an office “estate,” in the British term—just east of Canary Wharf and the City, known formally as East India Quay but by network engineers, and most everyone else, as just “Docklands.” It was a massive agglomeration, an entire Internet neighborhood. I wondered what was at its heart. And how far into its center I could go.

 
Arriving in London a season later, I approached the district in suitably futuristic fashion, riding one of the driverless trains of the Docklands Light Railway system. It quickly left behind the elegant arched and tiled corridors of the old Underground and skimmed east behind the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf, with the names of the big international banks illuminated on their crowns. It was a kind of corporate utopia, an urban landscape lifted from the pages of a J. G. Ballard novel, “set in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river”—that’s from Ballard’s High Rise, published in 1975. Its “high-rises stood on the eastern perimeter of the project, looking out across an ornamental lake—at present an empty concrete basin surrounded by parking-lots and construction equipment.” And, “the massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation on a bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the run-down areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation.”

  It wasn’t a forgiving place. I repeatedly found myself standing on the wrong side of a high steel fence, staring up at an unseen guard through the blank glass eye of a surveillance camera, or resignedly boarding an empty London bus with a tap of my fare card—always pulled back into the System, always on the Grid. No doubt this is Ballard’s world, albeit with a function beyond his imagining. East India Quay is iconically “super-modern,” the double-edged term used to describe a landscape of sleek architecture and profound loneliness, ubiquitous surveillance cameras and lost souls. In High Rise, Ballard describes his protagonist’s feeling of having “travelled forward fifty years in time, away from crowded streets, traffic hold-ups, and rush-hour journeys on the Underground,” away from the dirty old metropolis to a tidier future. Ballard’s description seemed so eerily prescient that it was hard to believe the area wasn’t finished until nearly twenty years later. There’s no mistaking that near futurism in the air of East India Quay—the distinct odorlessness of corporate control, the sense of a place defined by unseen forces. At every turn the place seemed eager to prove that reality is stranger than fiction. Or was it possible the reality was modeled on the fiction?