All these New York buildings keep the same secret: there is no trace of life inside. There’s even a skyscraper

It happens in virtually any big city, and you may have walked past it and not realized. We refer to that architecture that “seems like it is”, but in reality it is absolutely nothing. fake buildings or, as they are also called, “follies” urban. Spaces whose facades are so well built that we imagine life inside, and that in a city like New York acquire a more special halo.

The concept. He explained it perfectly in a passage of his novel Foucault’s Pendulum Umberto Eco, when two characters were talking about a house that was not actually what it seemed. “People walk past this house in Paris,” we read, “and they don’t know the truth. That the house is a fake. It is a facade, an enclosure without space, without interior. It is actually a chimney, a ventilation duct that serves to release vapors from the regional subway. And once you know it, you feel like you are standing in the mouth of the underworld…”

The curious thing is that, as we will see below, we are surrounded by this type of deceptive architecture.

The example in New York. The scene described above is not only real, it happens much more than we think. We have the most repeated example on the cover (image on the right), and it is so because of its fascinating surroundings. It occurs in 48 Joralemon Streetnear the East River, in Brooklyn Heights (New York). Apparently, it is just another home in a neighborhood that could appear in a Woody Allen movie, but its darkened windows make it “strange” and give a clue.

Originally built as a private residence in 1847, the reality is that became a ventilation/emergency exit building during construction of the Joralemon Street Tunnel Extension by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company from Bowling Green in Manhattan to Borough Hall in Brooklyn, which opened in 1908 (currently served by the 4 and 5 trains).

In other words, we are actually looking at a hidden New York subway ventilation plant and an emergency exit, and the buildings on either side are still ordinary homes. In fact, One recently sold for $6 million..

Roosevelt Island. The next visit to one of these fake Big Apple houses is in its suburbs. In fact, we need to take a small ferry to take us to Roosevelt Island. There is found the Strecker Memorial Laboratory. Built in 1892 as a laboratory for the City Hospital, it opened as “the country’s first institution for pathological and bacteriological research”, an activity that makes perfect sense in being kept separate from a dense urban environment.

What happened? Time took its toll. Abandoned in the fifties, it later became in another subway facilityspecifically in an energy conversion substation. Since then, no trace of “life” inside.

Another fan building. We now jump to a huge building that stands out at Pier 34one that also serves an essential function for New York public transportation: venting smoke and exhaust gases from the Holland Tunnel. And yes, like the rest, it is actually also “empty”, it is false.

However, all of these structures, owned and operated by public agencies, fulfill well-described and widely documented functions. Come on, they are not secrets at all, it’s just that most of us don’t know about them. In fact, the only building that really has a “history” to which we can include the nickname “secret” is the one we least think about. It is a skyscraper, and it is also in New York.

The AT&T tower. We told it a while ago. Located on the east side of Church Street, between Thomas and Worth Streets in Manhattan, stands a Brutalist-style structure with a flat concrete slab facade. The building has 29 floors with no windows, probably so that no one would know what was going on inside. The architecture was once a telephone exchange containing three large Class 4 switches used for long-distance telephony, two of them owned by AT&T.

Officially known as the “Long Lines Building”probably the saddest tower in New York, was designed in 1974 by architect John Carl Warneke. Although its most notable feature is its complete lack of windows, the building is also famous for its unusually high ceilings and for being designed to support a large amount of weight per square meter. This “fortress” was originally created to house AT&T carrier exchanges for its telephone switches and long distance equipment.

The safest. Although today they continue with that purpose, they also stores a portion of the company’s data center processing. It is not a trivial detail, since this ephemeral element of technological infrastructure has been considered so important that the building is built to survive the consequences of a nuclear explosion, being able to continue operating offline for up to two weeks.

For this reason, this ghost architecture is often referred to as one of the safest buildings in the United States, one you will not find people, but a completely self-sufficient and autonomous tower that contains its own gas and water supplies.

Plot twist. In short, a fascinating work where, attention, today we know that it has been used as a center for NSA espionage, a physical weapon of the surveillance state. Yes, just like that as explained in The Intercept either The New York Timesthe fortified skyscraper was not only made to save essential telecommunications equipment, a fortress of sorts for the information age, but it also houses equipment for controversial government data collection and wiretapping.

Other “fake” works. As we said at the beginning, there are many architectures of this type spread throughout the world. Designs that look like ordinary buildings but in reality have very different functions and, above all, are not inhabited at all. In Paris, several buildings have been designed to conceal subway vents or entrances to underground infrastructure.

An example is the structure on Rue La Fayette which is just a facade behind which equipment from the city’s subway system is hidden. Or in London, where there are also many urban follies, some areas near the famous Battersea Power Station They present false facades whose function is very simple and accompanies the rest of the architectures previously described: covering other structures, in this case ventilation for the underground transportation system.

Incidentally, they also serve to deceive us and imagine stories that never were.

Image | Inhabitat, Public Domain, Jim.Henderson, Tdorante10, Dhaluza

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