Без окон, без дверей: таинственный небоскрёб в Нью-Йорке оказался секретным центром АНБ

Здание принадлежит одной из крупнейших американских телекоммуникационных компаний AT&T. В нём расположена автоматическая телефонная станция, которая обрабатывает соединения между абонентами. В 1970-х годах главной функцией небоскрёба, который был спроектирован архитектором Джоном Уорником, называли обеспечение работы систем связи в случае ядерной войны. Строительство башни было завершено в 1974 году.

There’s a building in Manhattan with no windows!
(33 Thomas Street, if you’re interested) pic.twitter.com/8rEscp0WTS

Как стало известно изданию The Intercept, сегодня небоскрёб используется не столько для обеспечения работы АТС, сколько как ключевой центр Агентства национальной безопасности США, которое занимается сбором информации и прослушкой телефонных разговоров граждан.

При этом, согласно заявлениям бывших сотрудников AT&T, АНБ также прослушивает линии ООН, Международного валютного фонда, Всемирного банка и ещё как минимум 38 стран, включая ближайших союзников США — Германию, Францию и Японию.

Впервые информация о том, что АНБ собирает данные при помощи оборудования AT&T, была обнародована в рамках публикаций о деятельности спецслужб по материалам Эдварда Сноудена. По некоторым данным, сотрудничество с АНБ корпорация начала практически сразу же после терактов 11 сентября 2001 года. В частности, оператор мобильной связи фиксировал время звонка, телефонные номера абонентов и места, откуда и куда поступал звонок.

«Это очередное доказательство, что наши коммуникационные службы — по своей воле или против воли — становятся инструментом государственной слежки. Возможно, АНБ действует с разрешения органов, позволяющих следить за иностранцами, но сам факт, что спецслужба так глубоко проникла в инфраструктуру наших внутренних телекоммуникационных систем, должен навести нас на мысль, что такой сбор данных со стороны спецслужб может вестись не только в отношении иностранных граждан», — приводит издание слова директора Центра Бреннана Элизабет Гойтейн.

Как сообщается, одна из задач оборудования, установленного в башне, — перехват спутниковых сигналов в рамках программы Skidrowe. Для этих целей на крыше установлены спутниковые тарелки.

Кодовое название небоскрёба — Titanpointe — фигурирует во многих секретных документах АНБ, ставших достоянием общественности после разоблачений Сноудена. Провести параллель между этим названием и небоскрёбом на Манхэттене позволил текст внутреннего руководства для агентов АНБ. Так, в этом документе сотрудникам рекомендуют посещать башню, не привлекая внимания граждан. А компанию AT&T там называют Lithium.

Пережить атомный взрыв

Точное число сотрудников, работающих в здании на Томас-стрит, неизвестно. Согласно планам архитектора Уорника, в небоскрёбе могут длительное время находиться 1,5 тысячи сотрудников. Предусмотрен также значительный запас топлива для генераторов, способных поддерживать нормальное функционирование техники в течение двух недель.

При этом, отмечает The Intercept, в самой телекоммуникационной компании трудятся агенты АНБ, и большинство сотрудников AT&T даже не догадываются, что среди них скрываются представители этой спецслужбы. «Некоторые сотрудники осведомлены о связях своей структуры с ФБР, однако представления не имеют о вовлечённости её в АНБ», — говорится в руководстве для работников ведомства.

New York’s Oddest: The Skyscraper With No Windows

Jan 12, 2017 06:43pm GMT+0800

If you think about a modern building , the thing that would instantly come into mind are skyscrapers with large glass windows that are extremely appealing to the eye. This, however, is not the case of one very unique building in New York. The building at 33 Thomas St., New York.

So what makes the 33 Thomas St., building in New York extremely different from the other metal skyscrapers in the Big Apple? Well, for one, it does not bare a single window.

Yes, that’s right, a commercial building that does not give its workers or residents a view at all. Although it is an odd concept for a building, the previous company that owned it had a legit reason for making it that way.

The building with no windows, a past AT&T HQ

The building was owned by the company AT&T back in 1974 by the architect John Carl Warnecke. AT&T asked Warnecke to create a building for them that was secure enough to protect their expensive technology in case of a nuclear blast. It is said that the structure could even survive for more than 2 weeks after a fallout.

Well, it looks like Warnecke delivered what AT&T asked for.

Looking like a modern fortress as it stands out from all the skyscrapers.

Previously, the skyscraper was called Long Lines Building. The reason behind this was AT&T housed all of their solid-state switches and their long distance phone company lines in the building, thus the name Long Lines. The building might look like it could have more than 40 floors but in reality. it only has 29 floors.

Air vents can be seen on the side of the building.

Each floor of the building is 18 feet high and was also designed to bare extreme heavy weights. But today the building is no longer operated by AT&T although it is still used by some local phone companies for telephone switching as well as high security datacenters. It is also no longer named as Long Lines Building instead it has been named accordingly to the street at where it is located.

Модуль (Module) 8d № 2. ГДЗ Английский язык Spotlight 6 класс Ваулина. Нужна помощь с текстом, плиз!

a) Look at the title of the text. What do you expect to read? Listen, read and check.
Building Big
The Empire State Building is the tallest building in New York. It is 443 metres high and has 103 floors. It was built in 1930, and took one year and forty-five days to complete.
The ESB is one of the largest office spaces in the world, but it also has many shops and restaurants inside.
The Empire State Building has 73 super fast lifts. The fastest of these travel from the ground to the 80th floor in only 45 seconds! If you choose to walk to the top, you need to climb 1860 steps.
At the Empire State Building most visitors go straight to the Observatory on the 86th floor. The view is amazing. On a clear day you can see for miles around. Looking at the Empire State Building from a distance is also great. The top floors are decorated with beautiful lights. These change colours every day. Depending on the occasion, the building can be white, green, blue, purple, red or orange!
If you are ever in New York, don’t forget to visit the Empire State Building. It offers the best view of New York, and it is one of the city’s most historic buildings.

b) Read the statements and mark them (R) for Right, (W) for wrong and (DS) for Doesn’t Say.

1 The Empire State Building is the tallest building in America.
2 Lots of people work inside the Empire State Building.
3 You can get to the top of the Empire State Building in 45 seconds.
4 The lights on the top floors of the Empire State Building change colours many times a day.

How Luxury Developers Use a Loophole to Build Soaring Towers for the Ultrarich in N.Y.

Some of the tallest residential buildings in the world soar above Central Park, including 432 Park Avenue, which rises 1,400 feet and features an array of penthouses and apartments for the ultrarich.

But 432 Park also has an increasingly common feature in these new towers: swaths of unoccupied space. About a quarter of its 88 floors will have no homes because they are filled with structural and mechanical equipment.

The building and nearby towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city’s labyrinthine zoning laws. Floors reserved for structural and mechanical equipment, no matter how much, do not count against a building’s maximum size under the laws, so developers explicitly use them to make buildings far higher than would otherwise be permitted.

The towers benefiting the most from the zoning quirk have all sprouted during the past half-decade: enormous glass and steel buildings with lavish condominiums that sell for millions of dollars. Many line the blocks around Central Park, some of the most expensive and coveted real estate in the city, and have become second homes for Chinese billionaires, European tycoons and out-of-state hedge fund investors.

But the proliferation of these buildings is provoking a backlash amid a broader debate about affordable housing, megaprojects for the ultrarich and the city’s identity. Now, officials are seeking to rein in developers by proposing rules that would apply unusually large mechanical spaces toward a building’s height limit.

The motivation to build tall is obvious: panoramic views for residents and hefty profits for developers. A 95th floor condominium at 432 Park Avenue sold in December for $30.7 million, or about $7,592 a square foot. That same month, a unit about halfway down the building sold for $4,216 a square foot.

“It’s pretty outrageous, but it’s also pretty clever,” said George M. Janes, a planning consultant who has tracked and filed challenges against buildings in New York with vast unoccupied spaces. “What is the primary purpose of these spaces? The primary purpose is to build very tall buildings.”

The effort by the city to curb building heights has ignited a showdown with the powerful real estate industry, which has criticized the proposed rules as overly restrictive and misguided.

Harry B. Macklowe, who developed 432 Park Avenue, said he agrees with the effort to establish firm rules around mechanical spaces, but he rejected claims that his building was using them to rise higher. Every mechanical floor, he said, has equipment necessary for the building to function.

“It offends me,” Mr. Macklowe said, “because we created a very nice building that fits into the skyline perfectly.”

Many of these towers stay vacant most of the year, so their owners are not subject to local and state income taxes because they are not city residents. As a result, the state and city have already begun a separate crackdown on them.

State lawmakers proposed a pied-à-terre tax, an annual recurring tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million, but it was derailed under intense lobbying from real estate groups. Instead, lawmakers embraced a one-time fee on the sale of multimillion-dollar homes.

New York City’s complicated building regulations are meant to produce predictable developments. Height requirements are imposed in most of the city, though parts of Manhattan are exempt. Every block is also effectively assigned a maximum square footage, which can be spread across smaller buildings on a block or condensed in larger developments.

Savvy, well-heeled and patient developers have worked that system to their benefit. A developer seeking to build a supertall tower might start with one lot on a block and then buy unused square footage from its neighbors.

With advancements in engineering and construction, that developer can take the accumulated square footage and concentrate it in a skinny mega-tower. Floors of mechanical space, exempt from the square footage calculations, make the tower even taller.

“There is no question that they have become this lightning rod because they are not just luxury housing but uber-luxury housing,” said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Municipal Art Society, a nonprofit group that seeks to preserve the city’s architecture and urban design. She said they were unaffordable not only for the 99 percent but also for most of the 1 percent.

The city’s proposal aimed at supertall buildings — which needs to be approved by the City Council — would not eliminate enormous mechanical spaces but would penalize projects that have them.

Oversized mechanical floors — those greater than 30 feet tall, or about three times the size of a typical apartment’s ceiling height — would be counted toward the building’s maximum size. The rules would largely apply to developments around Central Park and in parts of Lower Manhattan.

Two other cities with skyscrapers, Chicago and Miami, have similar zoning codes but regulate mechanical floors differently.

In Chicago, big empty spaces — those greater than 5,000 square feet — are not counted toward the tower’s overall size, though officials said they knew of no complaints about developers exploiting the rule. In Miami, mechanical spaces are subtracted from the maximum size unless the area is an atrium or an open-air feature.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the proposed rules would “stop luxury developers from gaming the system.”

“Artificially tall mechanical spaces that serve no purpose but to boost views of top-floor apartments violate the spirit of our zoning regulations,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement.

But the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s influential lobbying arm, said the rules were too restrictive and at odds with engineering trends, such as the future need for large spaces for batteries to support renewable energy.

At a recent public hearing, engineers and architects said the proposal would drive up the cost of construction.

Daily News Building (New York City, New York)

476-foot, 36-story Art-Deco office building completed in 1930. Designed by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, it was headquarters for The New York Daily News until the mid-1990s. It was also the headquarters of United Press International until the news service moved to Washington, DC in 1982. The structure contained the newspaper’s offices and speculative office space in a tower set back above a 10-story base with larger floors to accommodate the presses. A 1957–60 addition to the building which expanded the lobby on the southwest corner of Second Avenue was designed by Harrison & Abramovitz, echoing the vertical stripes of the original design, except with a wider stripe.

The paper was originally called the Illustrated Daily News, the city’s first tabloid newspaper. By its second year, now shortened to just the Daily News, it was the second most-circulated paper. In December 1925, the paper’s circulation passed the one million mark, making the News New York’s largest newspaper. From 1921, the company operated out of a 5-story loft building at 21 Park Place downtown, but soon needed more space.

As completed, the News Building is a 36-story tower on East 42nd Street, attached to the 9-story printing plant on East 41st. The northern facade has only one major setback, two bays deep, at the 9th floor level. The setback is not pulled in from the sides, so that when seen head-on the building has the appearance of a slab until the very top, where at the 33rd floor the outer two bays on either end are inset one bay.

The western facade, fronting on the 25-foot alley, is not as visible as it would have been with the originally-planned 50-foot wide alley. Its setbacks are more complicated than those of the north front. The 2-bay setback at the 9th floor level on its north edge is matched by a 10-bay setback on its south edge, which also is pulled in two bays from the western facade. The 11th and 12th bays from the south rise to the 15th floor before being pulled back two bays. The ten southernmost bays on this side have smaller floor heights, and rise in a different pattern from those on the north. The total effect on the western front is a series of zig-zag setbacks and varied massing.

The southern front has 1-bay deep setbacks at the 7th and 13th floors, and a 2-bay deep setback at the 27th floor and at the top where the building’s exterior walls rise to hide the service shafts. The outer two bays on either side terminate at the 10th floor. The view from the southwest corner shows a very complicated set of stacked masses. The eastern front, now partially obscured by a 1959 addition, shows the setbacks of the northern and southern fronts; its seven northerly bays project forward from the main wall plane until the 33rd floor level.

The entire exterior is composed of tall slender bands of white brick alternating with window bays in which the windows are separated by patterned panels of reddish-brown and black brick; the windows originally had red-striped shades. At the lower floors the brick panels show geometric patterns, but these are gradually simplified higher up until in the upper windows they have become simple horizontal stripes. Wherever the building is set back, these panels have miniature setbacks within them.

The main entrance—on the north front—is through a 3-story high, 5-bay-wide polished granite block, with a large inscription at the top reading «THE-NEWS,» a smaller inscription below reading «HE MADE SO MANY OF THEM,» a bas-relief of the people of New York, and a background of skyscrapers culminating in an image of the Daily News Building from above which emanate the rays of the sun. To either side of the polished granite block is a glass pylon capped in bronze, and held to the block by bronze straps. A large bronze floral frieze is set above the doorway. The entrances at either side of the center, which originally led to stores, have smaller but similar bronze floral friezes. The brick patterns immediately above them show a more complicated version of the brick patterns in the window bays; they are overlapped by the terminations of the vertical bays of white brick. The same decorative treatment of alternating white brick bands and window bays, patterned brick, and bronze friezes, is carried around on the other fronts.

The lobby of the building includes a black glass domed ceiling, under which is the world’s largest indoor globe which was previously kept up to date; however, it has now not been updated for some time). This was conceived by the Daily News as a permanent educational science exhibit.

The ground floor on the south front has five loading bays in the tower portion of the building. The printing plant portion, in its original configuration, was nine stories high on East 41st Street and on Second Avenue, with no setbacks; a 1959 addition rises several stories above it and is set back from the building line in accordance with zoning laws. The decorative treatment of the printing plant is similar to that of the tower, but its narrow bays are set in groups of three defined by wider white brick piers. There are six loading bays on the East 41st Street front. The floral bronze frieze of the north front is repeated, again at the first-floor level, along the Second Avenue front of the printing plant. Designed to complement Hood’s tower, the addition is composed of vertical bands of white brick alternating with bays of windows and black and red brick panels, similar to Hood’s elements; the white bands, however, project out from the building and are sheathed in aluminum, in effect taking Hood’s conception several steps towards the more recent evolution of the International Style. The addition fills in the space at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and 42nd Street which had been bounded by the tower and printing plant, so that the News complex now fills the entire block between Second Avenue and the 25-foot alley, from East 41st to East 42nd Streets.

No longer occupied by the newspaper, the News Building is the home for former News TV subsidiary WPIX and was also home to WQCD, the smooth jazz station. The News had operated as WPIX-FM. Some time after former News parent Tribune Company took over WQCD outright, the station was sold to Emmis Communications. It is also known as the model for the headquarters of the fictional newspaper Daily Planet, the building where Superman works as journalist Clark Kent. The ground floor is occupied by the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance, a Capital One Bank branch, Pleroma restaurant, a Starbucks coffee, WPIX 11, and the Consulate General of Brazil.