Taconic Investment Partners (the same company that turned 111 Eighth Avenue into a carrier hotel) purchased the building in 2007, with grandiose plans to transform its much-derided windowless exterior and add new office space and condominiums. Relatively younger and decidedly less Deco than other major connection points in Manhattan, 375 Pearl was build in 1975 as a switching station by the New York Telephone Company. ![]() While this is by no means an exhaustive list, these are a few interesting starting points from which you can start looking for cable markings, cameras, or other signs of internet infrastructure. ![]() Many of the major internet exchanges and data centers of Manhattan are in buildings that used to be telegraph switches, telephone company headquarters, and other industrial spaces. New infrastructures have a tendency to inherit the homes of past infrastructures, and the internet is no exception. (Note: on much larger buildings, in particular skyscrapers, vents also could just be a sign of a mechanical floor, the centralized space dedicated to maintaining utility needs for the entire building.) ![]() Alternatively, look for windows, or more accurately, the absence of them. Identifying these buildings when looking on the street is not always easy, but one telltale sign is to look for signs of ventilation and cooling systems. Of course, there are plenty of not-so-famous buildings in Manhattan that store lots of data and connect networks to each other. Sightseeing There are a few well-known locations that people tend to go to when they want to "see the internet" in New York. The city tried to sell the network back to Northrop Grumman in 2011, but the contractor didn’t want it.ĭespite NYCWin’s shortcomings supporting law enforcement, their use in the city’s traffic systems has made it fantastically easy to share traffic data with law enforcement rapidly and seamlessly. Many regarded the project as a failure given its limited use (primarily by the Department of Transportation and the Department of Environmental Protection rather than law enforcement) and exorbitant cost (around $40 million annually just to maintain). Construction of the network began in 2006 under a $500 million contract with defense contractor Northrop Grumman ($20 million of which came from a DHS grant), and the network became operational in 2009. This system, initially piloted in 2011 and slowly rolled out to the city’s over 12,500 traffic signals, relies heavily on NYCWiN, the city-wide broadband wireless network project initially created for emergency first responders. The little green dome on top of the signal control is actually a powerful wireless router used for communicating with the other sensors in the traffic network and the city’s Traffic Management Center in Long Island City. Each signal control box contains wireless routing equipment and traffic controllers that connect back to a fiber hub. The system, designed by the North Carolina-based transit services company TransitScore, combines data collected by real-time traffic cameras, RFID (radio frequency identification) scanners, and other field sensors to create traffic signal times that adapt to the immediate conditions of traffic. ![]() These dark green signal control boxes attached to traffic signal posts are just one piece of a massive system of networked objects.
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