Pulses of Light Beneath the Streets

On a recent Monday night at 8:00pm, a crew of two men from Hugh O’Kane Electric Company parked on the corner of Duane Street and Greenwich Avenue, next to an Empire City Subway manhole. Second and third crews were setting up nearby, one at the corner of Greenwich and Harrison, one at Hudson and Duane. By 11:00pm, the team had completed a thousand-foot pull of fiber optic cable between the three locations, physically knitting together a tiny piece of the Internet underneath the streets of New York City.

A few years ago, author (and Urban Omnibus contributing editor) Andrew Blum accompanied another crew from Hugh O’Kane on a similar installation as research for his recently-released book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. Tubes is the result of Blum’s quest to visit, see, smell, listen to and otherwise experience the physical components of the Internet. As our connected lives become increasingly mobile, our perception of the Internet becomes increasingly intangible. Our chosen vocabulary reflects, or perhaps feeds, that belief: wireless connections, cloud computing, even Ethernet. “[W]e treat the Internet as if it were a fantasy,” writes Blum. But, “when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.”

His comparison to telephone systems is apt. As it turns out, the routing of these fibers and cables follows pathways carved out by the telecommunications infrastructure of decades past. Opening the Empire City Subway (ECS) manhole reveals 130 years of subsurface construction. Blum explains:

ECS owns approximately 11,000 manholes and 58 million feet of conduit in New York City, and it is the business of companies like Hugh O’Kane Electric Company to know intimately the vast “outside plant” underground telecom network. Almost every night, electrical workers find room amid the existing lines to meet our ever-increasing demand for digital bandwidth to accommodate our ever-expanding online activity. The video above chronicles just one stitch. Here’s how Blum describes the process:

The connection between the infrastructure of the Internet and telecommunications history is not limited to subsurface lines. Some of most important network meeting points in the city (possibly in the world) exist where dense overlaps of fiber occur, locations facilitated by dense networks of conduits. Two of the most significant meeting points in New York are 60 Hudson Street – which towers above the thousand-foot pull in the video above — and 32 Avenue of the Americas. The operations building at 32 Avenue of the Americas (formerly 24 Walker Street) used to be shared by Western Union and AT&T, and was one of the country’s largest long-distance telephone central offices in 1919. When Western Union moved to their own building in 1928, they built their headquarters at 60 Hudson Street, just three conduit-filled blocks away. “This is your modern marketplace,” says John Gilbert, COO of Rudin Management, the real estate company that now owns 32 Avenue of the Americas, “where handoffs are made, fiber touches fiber, networks touch other networks.”

The Internet is not magic, it’s a physical thing. It has buildings, hubs and infrastructure. Our international connections pass through cables that run across ocean floors. But there is poetry even in its physical components. Inside those conduits and cables, the Internet is, ultimately, pulses of light traveling along strands of glass. Light and glass that is laid down by the workers you pass by every night, that meet in neighborhood buildings, and that line the substratum of our streets. It is both extraordinary and ordinary. As one of the crew in the video above puts it: “You know how fiber works? You know what Morse Code is? It’s kind of the same principal. Except with light; and it’s broadcast nanoseconds apart.”

–V.S.