Today in 1982, AT&T (or “Ma Bell” as it was affectionately known) began its divestment into no fewer than 22 divisions. The drama started nearly a decade before when AT&T — the only telephone provider throughout most of the U.S. at the time — proposed to divvy itself up instead of losing the antitrust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice in 1974. What did it keep? Control of Western Electric (which made most of its equipment), the now outmoded Yellow Pages, the Bell trademark, Bell Labs, and AT&T Long Distance. It was more than a legal and administrative reshuffling, though, and the logistics of dealing with the company’s infrastructure took years to work out. AT&T’s Long Lines division, which handled 95 percent of the country’s long-distance calls pre-divestment, had to move its switches to new locations in cities across America including New York, whose purpose-built “Long Lines Building” in Tribeca (pictured) housed the city’s most formidable exchange station: 29 windowless concrete floors that contain an untold quantity in a spool of literal lines. “Untold” because it’s also one of the nation’s most secure sites, which reportedly contains data centers and government listening posts, as well as one the nation’s most impregnable sites, which can resist direct strikes and nuclear fallout. The Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street was designed by the architect John Carl Warnecke, who also designed a similar building in San Francisco for AT&T, not to mention Hawaii’s state capitol building and the site of John F. Kennedy’s grave, marked by an eternal flame. Image by Billie Grace Ward via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 DEED.
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