This happens in almost every major city, and you may have walked past it and not noticed. We call this architecture “it looks like it”, but in reality it is absolutely nothing. Fake buildings, or urban “follies” as they are also known. They are places with very well-built facades, spaces in which we dream of living, which become more special in a city like New York.

Concept. Foucault explained perfectly in a passage from Umberto Eco’s novel The Pendulum, where two characters talk about a house that is not really what it seems. “People pass by this house in Paris,” we read, “and they don’t know the truth. That the house is fake. It is a façade, an enclosure without space, without interior. In fact, it is a chimney, a ventilation duct used to vent vapors from the regional metro. And once you understand this, you feel as if you are standing at the mouth of the underworld…”

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

Example in New York. The scene described above is not only real, there is much more going on than we thought. On its cover we see the most repeated example (image on the right), and this is so because of its fascinating surroundings. It takes place at 48 Joralemon Street, near the East River in Brooklyn Heights (New York). It’s another house in the neighborhood that looks like it could appear in a Woody Allen movie, but its blacked-out windows make it “weird” and provide a clue.

Originally built as a private residence in 1847, the building was the site of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s Joralemon Street Tunnel extension from Bowling Green in Manhattan to Borough Hall in Brooklyn, which opened in 1908 (currently in service). It was converted into an emergency exit / ventilation building during its construction. with trains 4 and 5).

In other words, we’re essentially looking at a hidden New York City subway ventilation facility and emergency exit, and the buildings on either side are still ordinary houses. In fact, one recently sold for $6 million.

Roosevelt Island. The next visit to one of these fake Big Apple homes will be in the suburbs. We actually have to take a small ferry to take us to Roosevelt Island. Strecker Memorial Laboratory is located there. Built in 1892 as a laboratory for the City Hospital, this facility opened as “the country’s first pathological and bacteriological research institution”; It is a perfectly reasonable activity to keep it separate from the busy urban environment.

What happened? Time has taken its toll. Abandoned in the 1950s, it was later converted into another metro facility, specifically an energy conversion substation. There have been no signs of “life” inside since then.

Memorial Laboratory

Another fan building. Now we jump to a massive building prominently located at Pier 34, which also serves an important function for New York public transportation: venting smoke and exhaust gases from the Holland Tunnel. And yes, like the others, it is actually “empty”, wrong.

But all of these structures, owned and operated by public institutions, perform well-defined and widely documented functions. Come on, these are definitely not secrets, they’re just something most of us don’t know about. In fact, the only building with a real “history” to which we can add the nickname “secret” is the one we think about the least. It’s a skyscraper and it’s also in New York.

It’s a beautiful building right where Pier 34 ends, but it’s also fake.

AT&T tower. We just said it. Located on the east side of Church Street between Thomas and Worth Streets in Manhattan, stands a Brutalist-style structure with a plain concrete slab facade. The building has 29 floors and is windowless, presumably so that no one would know what’s going on inside. The architecture was once a telephone switchboard containing three large Class 4 switches used for long-distance telephony, two of which were owned by AT&T.

Officially known as the “Long Line Building,” arguably New York’s saddest tower was designed by architect John Carl Warneke in 1974. Although its most notable feature is the complete absence of windows, the building is also famous for its unusually high ceilings and for being designed to support large amounts of weight per square meter. This “fortress” was originally created to house AT&T’s carrier exchanges for telephone exchanges and long-distance equipment.

Be careful even if it is a skyscraper without windows

The safest. Although they continue with this purpose today, the company’s data center also hides some of its operations. This is not an unimportant detail, because this temporary element of technological infrastructure is considered so important that the building is being constructed to withstand the consequences of a nuclear explosion and be 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, a completely self-sufficient and autonomous tower where you cannot find humans, containing its own gas and water supplies.

Plot. In short, it’s a fascinating study of how attention, as we know today, is used as a physical weapon of the surveillance state, as the center of NSA espionage. Yes, as explained in The Intercept or The New York Times, the fortified skyscraper was not only built to protect essential telecommunications equipment, a kind of fortress for the information age, but also houses equipment for the collection of controversial government data and wiretaps.

Other “fake” jobs. As we said at the beginning, there are many architectures of this type spread around the world. Designs that look like ordinary buildings but actually have very different functions and, above all, are uninhabited. In Paris, several buildings have been designed to hide subway vents or entrances to underground infrastructure.

An example of this is the building on Rue La Fayette, with a façade behind which equipment for the city’s subway system is stored. Or in London, where there is a lot of urban madness, in some areas near the famous Battersea power station, there are false facades whose function is very simple and accompanies the rest of the architectures already described: they cover other structures, in this case providing ventilation to underground transport. system.

Meanwhile, they also serve to deceive us and imagine stories that never happened.

Image | Residential, Public Domain, Jim.henderson, Tdorante10, Dhaluza

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