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AT&T Building At 1407 Jefferson St.


PuroAztlan

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Does anyone know why their are no windows on huge portions of the building, leaving an almost blank wall looking at it from I-45 S. I'm sure there's equipment in there but has anyone ever been inside or known someone who has? I've wondered about this for years.

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We toured the inside when I was a student at UH (93ish). Wires, wires eveywhere. I think it's a CO (Central Office).

They just want to protect the equipment.

If you think that is secure you should check out the Williams CO (or is it a "Switch") off the viaduct. It's next to the HISD Food building and looks like a cube.

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I've often wondered about this building as well. It sure is ugly.

Wouldn't it be cool if they could paint a huge mural on the windowless part of the building? Even a huge AT&T logo/advertisement would be better than a blank wall...

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I always figured those buildings were some kind giant switching station. There is another one on Weslayan between Richmond and Alabama IIRC. There is no parking structures to support the kind of office space that something of that size could hold, and without windows, I assumed them to be, as some one pointed out, just full of wires.

Seems to me that these might be obsolete in a few years with IP telephony and mobile not needing such massive dedicated infrastructure. That can't be cheap to maintain...

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Some of these telecom bunkerscrapers were obselete before they even finished construction back in the 60s. They designed and built these, at least the first wave of them, to handle massive expansions of 1950s telephone switching technology which consumed enormous amounts of space to get the job done, plus they were factoring in 5 nines of reliability.

Speaking of murals on telecom bunkerscrapers....the one in Shreveport has a HUGE mural on it.

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I've often wondered about this building as well. It sure is ugly.

Wouldn't it be cool if they could paint a huge mural on the windowless part of the building? Even a huge AT&T logo/advertisement would be better than a blank wall...

The huge radar looking thing on top has always been an oddity. Communicate with other planets?

Imagine having to work inside? Ugly is correct. Crater Houston? Too good to be true. -_-

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Speaking of murals on telecom bunkerscrapers....the one in Shreveport has a HUGE mural on it.

I just drove past that thing a couple of days ago. Shreveport--now there's a sorry downtown. With the exception of a newish bank building and a couple of cheesy casino hotels, timed stopped there in 1976. I guess the shiny new Shreveport, if there is one, is not near the 1-20.

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I just drove past that thing a couple of days ago. Shreveport--now there's a sorry downtown. With the exception of a newish bank building and a couple of cheesy casino hotels, timed stopped there in 1976. I guess the shiny new Shreveport, if there is one, is not near the 1-20.

LOL I think the shiny new shreveport would be the riverboats....

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I don't know if the story was true but my Father sold building materials years ago in Houston and he sold concrete block, bricks and mortar to construction firms. Next door to the AT&T building years ago there was an old two story frame house that an older lady lived in. She had lived there for many years and during every phase of construction at the phone building she would sit on her front porch and delicate flower at the workers to stay off her property. On several occasions some form of building material would fall and hit her house and she would scream and yell and call everyone from the phone company to the contractor, to the police, to city hall. Eventually the construction firm just learned that if it happened they would send someone to apoligize and basiclly offer the lady some small amount of money to "settle" the issue. My Father told my that story many times over the years.

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I don't know if the story was true but my Father sold building materials years ago in Houston and he sold concrete block, bricks and mortar to construction firms. Next door to the AT&T building years ago there was an old two story frame house that an older lady lived in. She had lived there for many years and during every phase of construction at the phone building she would sit on her front porch and delicate flower at the workers to stay off her property. On several occasions some form of building material would fall and hit her house and she would scream and yell and call everyone from the phone company to the contractor, to the police, to city hall. Eventually the construction firm just learned that if it happened they would send someone to apoligize and basiclly offer the lady some small amount of money to "settle" the issue. My Father told my that story many times over the years.

HAHA man that is too funny. I love this forum for stories like this. We all know little bits and pieces of this huge, spraawling city we live in. Thanks for sharing that.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Buildings like these have few windows because they were never intended to house people. Never more than a few at a time, anyway. Reducing the number of windows and doors also reduces the number of ways that dust can get into the building and cause problems with the equipment. For this reason many are kept at a higher air pressure inside than it is outside. When someone opens the door there's a little "poof" of air moving outward to keep the dust at the threshold out.

The things you see on the roof are microwave horns. Those are one of the ways the various switching stations communicate with each other and your phone call/fax/internet traffic gets from one place to another.

As for these buildings going away, I don't see it happening anytime soon. Sure, computers and switching systems get smaller all the time, but the demand keeps growing. And unlike at your home, a big company can't just throw away equipment because it's old or out of fashion. The IRS has very specific rules for this sort of thing. I believe it's five years, though my accountant mentioned that recently it was changed to three years for computers. But since this is probably considered "industrial" equipment it might be much longer.

I think a mural would be a great addition to these bland buildings. I'm surprised they aren't already supporting billboards.

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I think a mural would be a great addition to these bland buildings. I'm surprised they aren't already supporting billboards.

The city's ordinances pertaining to signage aren't very forgiving anymore where building-mounted billboards are concerned unless you're just advertising the building itself. I also had the idea at one time that i could use a projector such as they used at drive-in movie theaters to project advertisements onto the to blank concrete walls of the Central Square building in Midtown as a mechanism to more easily finance its purchase, but there are ordinances prohibiting that, too.

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  • 4 months later...

The horns on top are microwave antannas that are no longer used (I don't think). The microwave equipment were part of the old AT&T Long Lines system that carried "long distance" telephone taffic. The Long Lines system was also part of the "doomsday" communication system that would be called upon in event of nuclear war with the USSR. Most of the folks working on that system were security cleared, etc, and the system carried a lot of governmental traflfic. For instance when the president traveled, direct, secure lines of comm were carried on the system.

Most likely atleast parts of that building are nuclear blast hardened, hence the small windows and complete lack of windows in places. I wouldn't be surprised if the windowless side faces the ship channel/baytown areas which would have been a likely nuclear target, but I can't remember which side it's on...

A Google search on AT&T Long Lines brings up some neat pictures of mothballed facilities complete with nuclear decontamination equipment and supplies...

Dave.

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So that huge red & white tower in Spring is part of the "Long Line"? There is one on 45 a few minutes from Dallas as well.

Maybe AT&T could have a mural like this...

ztrompe_doeil_005.jpg

wow...I'm dizzy just from looking at it

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FWIW, I remember a time in Houston when the city considered building all municipal buildings with NO WINDOWS, because of the cost of keeping cool in the summer. They were to have fake windows on the outside.

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My wife is a retiree from SWBell, ATT, Lucent, etc and worked in the "Jefferson Toll Building" awhile. It was a toll building that handled calls for the area and especially Long Distance. And, yes it contained wiring, computers and all other materials necessary for calls to go through. Very few people worked there and it was solid brick because of security( hurricanes, anything pre 9/11) as well as keeping the environment out of the building. The Weslayan building was somewhat similar. There are buildings all around town that were built much the same way for local localls such as the MOhawk Exchange ( remember MO 3/6-XXXX) building near the old Bellaire theatre and one on Fondren near Vargo's for that area's exchange.

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I had to pass that fugly building every day to go to work for a long time. At one time, it was even growing mold. This has to be one of downtown's most boring buildings. Nothing but a few cars and a motorcycle- dead SILENCE!!`The long green mile...'

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  • 9 years later...
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There's a bunch of black poles spread out through downtown that were installed in the run up to the Super Bowl.  I asked one of the workers and they said it was "for cell phones".  I could see them going to smaller more distributed antennas and dismantling the microwave dishes on top of this building

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