The Role of 33 Thomas Street

The tower known as 33 Thomas Street in New York, originally an AT&T Long Lines building, served as a crucial telephone switching hub for long-distance communications on the eastern U.S. coast. With its imposing granite facade and lack of windows, it was architecturally designed to insulate the sensitive equipment inside from external influences. This structure facilitated massive volumes of communication, including connections to transatlantic cables, establishing it as a significant infrastructure point. However, its prominence also marked it as a single point of failure, which was dramatically illustrated during a failure event in 1991 that led to dropped calls for over five million users and disrupted air traffic control across multiple airports.