There’s a 550-foot skyscraper in Lower Manhattan with no windows, no logos, and no obvious purpose. Officially, it was built in the 1970s as a telecom switching hub—but behind its Brutalist facade lies a deeper, darker story of Cold War paranoia, surveillance infrastructure, and the quiet centralization of America’s communications empire.

In this episode, we dig into the strange history of 33 Thomas Street: a nuclear-hardened structure built by AT&T to safeguard the long-distance phone network—and possibly home to an NSA surveillance program known as TITANPOINTE. From the earliest party lines to the rise of mass wiretapping, discover how America’s phone system became a tool of both connection and control.

These man on the street interviews were recorded by me a long time ago. 1979. At the time, the concept of an information society, and information economy, the end of the industrial age, was a new idea propelled by Silicon Valley startups. I was the director of a documentary called the information society which ran on national public television in 1979. One of the ideas I had was to record little clips of people around the country answering questions. I directed them to answer largely with one word for montage that I was going to build, and these are the outtakes. I found a can of 16mm film and magnetic audio in my basement and had them copied to digital. Of course Wall Street is a unique place on the planet and we knew that the people we would interview would be smart and to some extent, involved with computers and information technology.

Welcome to Obsession to Detail, where we dissect the world’s most interesting things with an obsessive eye. In this episode, architectural historian Anthony W. Robins (Tony) unpacks the fierce rivalry between the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Woolworth Building—three titans that defined NYC’s race for the sky.

From the Art Deco brilliance of the Chrysler Building to the towering dominance of the Empire State and the gothic grandeur of the Woolworth, we break down their design innovations, engineering marvels, and the competitive spirit that shaped New York’s skyline.