Ugly ATT building downtown (Tulsa, Stillwater: sales, tornadoes, design)

[randy987]

There is a rather ugly ATT building downtown. It's rather brown or bashe with no windows. For many years I've wondered what that building is for at ATT. Does anybody know?

I tried to figure it out a year ago but could never determine what they did in it. Kind of drove me crazy because I used to work down town and I would see that building every day. They no windows think bugs me too.

Thanks.

[KayneMo]

I'm not completely sure, but I think it's a telecommunications hub housing equipment and such. Many cities have such a building.

Other examples:
OKC:


Fort Worth:


Kansas City, MO:


Denver:

[StillwaterTownie]

Neither does the A T & T in Stillwater have anything that looks like regular windows.

[Ttark]

Probably a long distance/toll center, this is where the area's "tandem" switches that connect your local phone exchanges into ATT's long-distance network are (probably also has the gateway hubs to the ISP for DSL service). There's one like that in Portland downdown. In the old days these used to be full of noisy step by step or crossbar machines (lots and lots of clicking relays!!! they'd sound like a thousand electric typewriters or machine guns all going off at once, constantly) but now they're all big Nortel DMX 250 or 500 computers. Depending on the arrangement they could also have a end office providing local phone service & centrex to the area surrrounding it in that same building as well. Long distance and 555-1212 operators used to work in these places before that all got centralized into just a couple locations to service the whole country.

your phone line -> your CO/local exchange -> local access tandem @ your CO -> trunk line -> toll switch -> another trunk -> greater PSTN
(that's kind of oversimplified but that's the basic idea)

[randy987]

Thanks for all the posts. A lot more information then I had before. It does bear a striking resemblance to the OK City pics.

[swake]

There's a huge one at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge in NY as well. Every city has them. Some are labeled AT&T and some are Verizon. They are all old Ma Bell artifacts.

[CPitty]

This building in Tulsa does mostly sales and call center work. There might be a Central Office (CO) inside but it is not a major telecom hub within the city. I work in telecommunications and i can tell you i have never installed any services to that location. Its really just an eyesore.

[Bobdreamz]

Originally Posted by swake

There's a huge one at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge in NY as well. Every city has them. Some are labeled AT&T and some are Verizon. They are all old Ma Bell artifacts.

Manhattan AT&T building :


http://i.imgur.com/GdEcsiV.jpg

Ma Bell constructed these buildings without windows to protect them from weather elements (hurricanes / tornadoes, etc.) and the one in NYC is said to be built like a bunker in the case of a nuclear war so that they would keep functioning.
Scary thought! ( hence why they are so ugly ! They were built for functionality not beauty. )

[Ttark]

Revisiting this thread for a moment.

See that vacant antenna tower in the upper left corner of the Denver picture that looks like a scaffolding to nowhere? It (likely) held an array of the big boxy AT&T/Western Electric model KS15676 "hog ear" C-band horn antennas, back when terestrial microwave L-carrier was still a thing. That office was probably a toll center with a microwave station or group of stations. Long Lines phased out by the mid-80s and declared the system completely obsolete by the early 90s when fiber optic T-carrier became cheap and plentiful enough for long-haul usage. At minimum there were four horns to an array, two pairs for transmit and receive facing opposite directions on the tower since it's a bidirectional system. The transceivers were connected to (typically) a #1/4/5 crossbar or a #4 ESS that did the call switching and routing, i.e. to offload it to the local network or another wire or radio trunk to the next toll center in the chain.

There were satellite trunks in the long distance network but that was really just a stopgap while the phone company figured out what to do about its aging terrestrial microwave trunks before the widespread uptake of fiber, as well as staying relevant and competitive against the rapidly improving quality of competing long distance carriers like MCI and US Sprint.

The towers and their supporting buildings were designed and built to (literally) withstand nuclear war, thus a lot of them are still standing and have been repurposed for e.g. cell phone services, FM/TV stations, local 2-way radio comms and microwave data relays/repeater backhauls. Most of the few intact vintage AT&T horns, if they haven't been refurbished and preserved by collectors, have long fallen into disuse and decrepitude.

More reading/pictures:
[url]http://long-lines.net/[/url]
[url]https://hackaday.com/2017/07/10/horns-across-america-the-att-long-lines-network/[/url]
[url]https://99percentinvisible.org/article/vintage-skynet-atts-abandoned-long-lines-microwave-tower-network/[/url]
[url]http://spencerjharding.com/books/the-long-lines/[/url]
[url]http://kd5knz.blogspot.com/2004/04/at-long-lines-microwave-horn-removal.html[/url]
[url]http://coldwar-ma.com/ATT_Chesterfield.html[/url]

[Johnhw2]

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/...-nsa-spy-hubs/

Take a look at this link about what these buildings were used for in a few major cities.