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Comment by jblock | Hacker News Reader

I had never been to SF before last summer. This building was right across from the bus I took home every day. And every day I wondered: what was in that windowless building? Never was it not an imposing sight.

Even after I found out about this, it freaked me out; especially that it's right in the heart of downtown.

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Is this the building?

http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-8/611-folsom-street-nsa.jpg

Is that just very horrid architecture, or some kind of shielding? Perhaps both?

It's a bit a lot of things. I can't find when the building was built, but I'm guessing the 60s/70s, so pretty much the height of brutalist architecture. Basically, very hard geometric forms, heavy on repetition, lots of concrete. There's a lot of that type of stuff sitting around, especially on university campuses.

It appears to be have been actually designed for use as a telephone switching center, for which windows actually are mostly useless. Should take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street, another telephone exchange in NYC. It is literally a window-less skyscraper.

Most big cities have a communications building like this.

My favorite one is in NYC: 33 Thomas Street. It looks like it was designed to be the capitol of a dystopian megalopolis.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/33_Thoma...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/33_Thoma...

Speaking of dystopia... I bet it houses a spy room just like the one in SF!

Reminds me of the film Equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film) very imposing building!

Everything about this comment is perfect, down to your username.

33 Thomas Street is an awesome building, self-sufficient, radiation hardened, and 18 foot ceilings.

That's the place. On the corner of 2nd and Folsom.

Same here! I moved to Lansing St. 2 years ago and so I always walked past the building. The fact it had no windows was pretty weird and concerning and so I often joked that it was probably a spy agency/wire tapping operation. I was pretty surprised when I read that it pretty much was built for that purpose.

You honestly couldn't have designed a building that could have stuck out and raised more suspicion than this one.

"I often joked that it was probably a spy agency/wire tapping operation. I was pretty surprised when I read that it pretty much was built for that purpose."

The building wasn't built to be a spy agency or a wire-tapping operation. It's an AT&T switching center. Among other things, it's the terminus of a number of important trans-Pacific fiber cables, and it's been around for longer than the NSA has been rumored to have a room inside of it.

No, sorry, but there's absolutely nothing "weird" about a windowless telephone exchange building. At one time, every single neighborhood in this country had one.

This building was not created for this, it's just an old Bell building that had some empty space which could be repurposed.

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