The bowels

I have been passing by this building for years, and looking through a rectangular window in a door through which you can see a long corridor lined with telecommunications equipment that is stacked from the floor all the way to a very tall ceiling. There are ladders on wheels attached to tracks in the ceilings so that whoever needs to can reach any piece of the equipment for whatever reason there is for the people who presumably work there would need to do so.

Looking through the window is like looking back in time. The building, inside and out looks like it was built in the late 60's or early 70's. There is a Bell Atlantic logo, but that was part of the Bell telephone system that was broken up decades ago. I am guessing that it used to be some sort of relay station for the phone system when it was all landlines, long before mobile towers and fiber optics.

The lights are still on inside, and you can see little lights lit up on the equipment. But never having seen any human beings in there, it's almost like it's a forgotten part of a system that otherwise is long gone. Like a soldier, marooned on an island, that doesn't know the war he's fighting is long over.

Noticed

Febrary 16, 2025