Actor Tom Hanks broke the Twitternet recently over a mysterious Manhattan skyscraper that caused him to recoil: “This is the scariest building I've ever seen! WTF goes on inside?? Hanx,” he tweeted. An eruption of humorous retweet retorts (let’s called them “retworts") subsequently exploded across the Twitterverse. The star of clandestine films Bridge of Spies and Charlie Wilson’s War has keen paranoid instincts and a fierce subterfuge radar. The Oscar winner snapped the most mysterious skyscraper in Manhattan, one with a secret history. Known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, the bizarre windowless tower at 33 Thomas Street is more than meets the eye. In fact, if you blink, you might miss it. Wait until Hanks gets a load of what’s reportedly inside the suspicious concrete fortress in lower Manhattan between Tribeca and the Brooklyn Bridge. Call them facts or conspiracy theories, here are 11 covert nuggets about the cryptic building nicknamed “Project X.”1. The Long Lines Building, designed by John Carl Warnecke (architect of the JFK Eternal Flame), is an unorthodox Bauhaus-inspired tower with a windowless façade in pinkish-gray Swedish granite. The façade’s battlement-style vertical shafts and square vents give the structure a creepy castle prison specter amid other Manhattan skyscrapers. The night sky shrouds the lightless tower as a black shadow on the horizon after dusk.2. Completed in 1974, the building is a typical example of “brutalist architecture” favored by government, educational and big housing projects from the 1950s to 1970s—showcasing unaesthetic (and often perplexing) large forms and exposed concrete or brickwork that recalls an eastern bloc, Soviet-era secret state. They typically inhabit massive amounts of people, residents and employees. But 33 Thomas Street inhabits massive machine power.3. The Long Lines Building neighbors the Western Union Building (circa 1930) and the original AT&T building (circa 1932)—the so-called “brick mountain” telecom palaces that architect Ralph Walker designed in the telegraph age to showcase New York City’s energy and power during the Great Depression. More than 80 years later, unbridled government power is at issue since AT&T moved facilities and operations blocks away to Warnecke’s enigmatic building.4. The tower is 550-feet high but only 29 stories tall due to its nearly 20-foot double-height floor-to-ceiling interiors. It also has three sub-basement levels. Labeled “Project X” in Warnecke’s original architectural drawings, it was designed as “a skyscraper to be inhabited by machines.” Today, the former long distance telephone and telegraph hub operates primarily as a fortified, high security corporate data complex (and alleged covert government nerve center) with powerful computers, cables, switchboards and “big brother” surveillance equipment.5. Paranoia plays a big role here, Hanx.
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