New York Telephone
Encyclopedia
The New York Telephone Company (NYTel) was organized in 1896, taking over the New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 operations of the American Bell Telephone Company
American Telephone & Telegraph
AT&T Corp., originally American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American telecommunications company that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agencies. AT&T is the oldest telecommunications company...

.

Predecessor companies

The Telephone Company of New York was formed under franchise in 1876 to rent telephone instruments to users, who were expected to provide wires to connect them, for example from factory to office. Such connections already existed for private telegraphs, and the new invention promised to save the cost of hiring a private telegraph operator. Manufacturers of steel wire for the Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...

 then under construction were especially prominent among the customers under this scheme, using their own product.
Western Union
Western Union
The Western Union Company is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is in Englewood, Colorado. Up until 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S...

 subsidiaries, including Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph, Gold and Stock Telegraph, and American Speaking Telephone, based their New York and San Francisco operations on the telephone exchange
Telephone exchange
In the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls...

 principle and thus were larger and more advanced than the local Bell operations. Under the November 1879 settlement of the Elisha Gray
Elisha Gray
Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company...

 patent infringement lawsuit, Western Union handed over its telephone operations to National Bell Telephone, which then renamed itself American Bell Telephone. The merged local company was called the Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company. In 1896 the operations of Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Westchester Telephone Company (which served northern suburban areas, including parts of then-Westchester County
Westchester County, New York
Westchester County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. Westchester covers an area of and has a population of 949,113 according to the 2010 Census, residing in 45 municipalities...

 which subsequently were incorporated into New York City as the Borough
Borough
A borough is an administrative division in various countries. In principle, the term borough designates a self-governing township although, in practice, official use of the term varies widely....

 of The Bronx
The Bronx
The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is also known as Bronx County, the last of the 62 counties of New York State to be incorporated...

) were consolidated under the name of the New York Telephone Company.
The New York and New Jersey Telephone Company, a Bell licencee serving Long Island and Staten Island, was broken up and its New York properties merged with the New York company as the City and Suburban Telephone Company in 1897. American Telephone and Telegraph
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

 (AT&T) eventually acquired a controlling interest and restored the New York Telephone name.

Infrastructure

The company went underground in a big way in the 1920s, creating expensive new outside plant
Outside plant
In telecommunication, the term outside plant has the following meanings:*In civilian telecommunications, outside plant refers to all of the physical cabling and supporting infrastructure , and any associated hardware located between a demarcation point in a switching facility and a demarcation...

 that fixed its geometry for the century to come. New cable ducts brought more reliable service to customers. They converged at approximately twenty wire centers, which were connected by larger trunk
Trunking
In modern communications, trunking is a concept by which a communications system can provide network access to many clients by sharing a set of lines or frequencies instead of providing them individually. This is analogous to the structure of a tree with one trunk and many branches. Examples of...

 cable ducts running along the East and West Sides of Manhattan. The locations were a mile or two apart (2–3 km), close to concentrations of office workers without paying prime prices for land. At each wire center a new central office arose, usually designed by architectural firms that later joined HLW International
HLW International
HLW is an international architecture and design consultancy, with headquarters in New York City, with offices in Los Angeles, London and Shanghai. It is one of the oldest surviving architectural firms in the United States, tracing its beginnings to 1885 in New York.-Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz :The firm...

, to house telephone switchboard
Telephone switchboard
A switchboard was a device used to connect a group of telephones manually to one another or to an outside connection, within and between telephone exchanges or private branch exchanges . The user was typically known as an operator...

s, panel switch
Panel switch
The panel switching system was an early type of automatic telephone exchange, first put into urban service by the Bell System in the 1920s and removed during the 1970s...

es and other inside plant
Inside plant
In telecommunication, the term inside plant has the following meanings:*All the cabling and equipment installed in a telecommunications facility, including the main distribution frame and all the equipment extending inward therefrom, such as PABX or central office equipment, MDF heat coil...

, and technicians, clerks, operators and other workers. The largest of these was also the corporate headquarters
Verizon Building
The Verizon Building is a 32-story Art Deco building in New York City, located in Lower Manhattan. It is named for Verizon Communications, for which it is the headquarters. The building is located at 140 West Street, adjacent to the World Trade Center site and 7 World Trade Center, and is bounded...

, at 140 West Street on the Lower West Side, about a kilometer (half mile) from AT&T HQ at 195 Broadway
195 Broadway
195 Broadway is a 29-story building on Broadway in the Financial District of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It was the longtime headquarters of American Telephone and Telegraph, as well as Western Union for a time. It occupies an entire block on one side of Broadway, running from Dey...

.

The Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

 and Bronx parts of the underground empire are owned by the Empire City Subway
Empire City Subway
Empire City Subway is a company in New York City which is responsible for maintaining underground conduits in Manhattan and The Bronx, and the manholes by which those conduits are accessed. The company was formed in 1891 as part of a plan for common utility ducts to consolidate all utilities...

 Company subsidiary. Similar construction, on a smaller scale, went on in Brooklyn, Buffalo
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...

 and other urban areas. Suburban and rural service also expanded, mostly with aerial cable or open wire plant and Strowger switch
Strowger switch
The Strowger switch, also known as Step-by-Step or SXS, is an early electromechanical telephone switching system invented by Almon Brown Strowger...

es.

Service crisis

Forecasters in the late 1960s underestimated demand, resulting in a shortage of capacity in Manhattan, NYTel's principal profit area. Customers had to wait weeks for a new line or a repair, and sometimes minutes for dial tone on an existing line. The new 1ESS
1ESS switch
The Number One Electronic Switching System, the first large-scale Stored Program Control telephone exchange or Electronic Switching System in the Bell System, was introduced in Succasunna, New Jersey, in May 1965. The switching fabric was composed of reed matrixes controlled by wire spring relays...

 Stored Program Control exchanges had software bugs that kept them from carrying full load. Deferred maintenance choked main distribution frame
Main distribution frame
In telephony, a main distribution frame is a signal distribution frame for connecting equipment to cables and subscriber carrier equipment . The MDF is a termination point within the local telephone exchange where exchange equipment and terminations of local loops are connected by jumper wires...

s (MDFs) with dead jumpers. There were not enough cables to office buildings, nor enough underground conduits to install them. Morale was poor in all levels and departments; strikes were frequent.

The response of the company was to hire and train thousands of new employees and to buy much new equipment for them to work on. Underground construction took years, but emergency installation of Anaconda Carrier pair gain
Pair gain
In telephony, pair gain is a method of transmitting multiple POTS signals over the twisted pairs traditionally used for a single traditional subscriber line in telephone systems. Pair gain has the effect of creating additional subscriber lines...

 systems normally used in rural areas expanded service while construction was in progress. Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 added processing power to their new systems and fixed the software bugs. A new wire center at 1095 Avenue of the Americas
1095 Avenue of the Americas
1095 Avenue Of The Americas is a 630 ft tall skyscraper in New York City, New York. It was constructed from 1972 to 1974 as headquarters of New York Telephone and has 41 floors. The building also served as the headquarters of Bell Atlantic. Kahn & Jacobs designed the building, which is the...

 and 42nd Street relieved four others in Midtown Manhattan
Midtown Manhattan
Midtown Manhattan, or simply Midtown, is an area of Manhattan, New York City home to world-famous commercial zones such as Rockefeller Center, Broadway, and Times Square...

 of part of their load, as well as providing the company with a new headquarters for the next quarter century. The crisis subsided during the 1970s and workers accustomed to heavy overtime had to learn to go home on time and get along on their base pay.
February 27, 1975 brought a fire in the telephone building at 204 Second Avenue, at East 13th Street. The MDF was destroyed, disconnecting tens of thousands of customers, and obsolescent switching equipment was destroyed or damaged by acrid smoke. Located at the south end of the East Side trunk cable duct under Second Avenue
Second Avenue (Manhattan)
Second Avenue is an avenue on the East Side of the New York City borough of Manhattan extending from Houston Street at its south end to the Harlem River Drive at 128th Street at its north end. A one-way street, vehicular traffic runs only downtown. A bicycle lane in the left hand portion from 55th...

, this building connects many circuits to Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

 which were disrupted. A Bell System mobilization dealt with the crisis, including replacing the destroyed MDF. An obsolete and recently retired exchange at the West 18th Street office, not yet melted down for scrap metal, was temporarily resurrected to serve thousands of E13 customers though existing cross-town cables. The damaged Number One Crossbar Switching System
Number One Crossbar Switching System
The Number One Crossbar Switching System, or 1XB switch, was the primary urban local telephone exchange design used by the Bell System in the mid-20th century. Its switch fabric topology was based on the earlier urban panel switch system, which, in turn, was based on the turn of the century...

 (1XB switch) was cleaned, and a Number One Electronic Switching System
1ESS switch
The Number One Electronic Switching System, the first large-scale Stored Program Control telephone exchange or Electronic Switching System in the Bell System, was introduced in Succasunna, New Jersey, in May 1965. The switching fabric was composed of reed matrixes controlled by wire spring relays...

 (1ESS switch) that had been destined for the 104 Broad Street exchange was diverted. This was the largest loss of telephone service from fire in United States history, until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Wholly owned subsidiary

New York Telephone was an AT&T subsidiary until the AT&T breakup effective January 1, 1984. At that time, New York Telephone, along with the New England Telephone & Telegraph Company
New England Telephone
The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, more commonly known as New England Telephone, was a Bell Operating Company that served most of the New England area of the United States as a part of the original AT&T for seven decades, from the creation of the national monopoly in 1907 until...

, became part of a Regional Bell operating company
Regional Bell Operating Company
The Regional Bell Operating Companies are the result of United States v. AT&T, the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust suit against the former American Telephone & Telegraph Company . On January 8, 1982, AT&T Corp. settled the suit and agreed to divest its local exchange service operating...

 named NYNEX
NYNEX
NYNEX Corporation was a telephone company that served five New England states as well as most of New York state, except the Rochester area, from 1984 through 1997....

. The company was referred to as "New York Telephone, a NYNEX Company" before being called simply "NYNEX" starting on January 1, 1994. On August 15, 1997, NYNEX was acquired by Bell Atlantic, who kept the Bell Atlantic name. On June 30, 2000, Bell Atlantic acquired GTE
GTE
GTE Corporation, formerly General Telephone & Electronics Corporation was the largest independent telephone company in the United States during the days of the Bell System....

 to form the current Verizon Communications
Verizon Communications
Verizon Communications Inc. is a global broadband and telecommunications company and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average...

, with the corporate headquarters remaining same 1095 Avenue of the Americas location until 2006 when HQ returned to 140 West Street.

New York Telephone provides local telephone service throughout the state of New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, with the exception of the areas served by the Rochester Telephone Company
Rochester Telephone Company
“Rochester Telephone Company” may refer to:*Rochester Telephone , a company founded in 1920 and changed its name to Frontier Corporation....

 and other smaller independent local exchange companies. The company also serves the Greenwich and Byram exchanges in Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

. The rest of Connecticut is served by SNET
SNET
The Southern New England Telephone Company is a local exchange carrier owned by AT&T. It started operations on January 27, 1878 as the District Telephone Company of New Haven. It was the founder of the first telephone exchange, as well as the world's first telephone book...

, an AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

 company.

One of New York Telephone's most widely-used advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

 slogan
Slogan
A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commercial, religious and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. The word slogan is derived from slogorn which was an Anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm . Slogans vary from the written and the...

s/jingle
Jingle
A jingle is a short tune used in advertising and for other commercial uses. The jingle contains one or more hooks and lyrics that explicitly promote the product being advertised, usually through the use of one or more advertising slogans. Ad buyers use jingles in radio and television...

s was "We're all connected... New York Telephone." This slogan was also used by Midwestern RBOC Ameritech
Ameritech
AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation , was a U.S. telecommunications company that arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies that was created following the breakup of the Bell System...

.

New York Telephone, then operating under the Bell Atlantic brand, was the first Bell telephone company to win approval to provide long distance service within its operating territory in December 1999, following the Telecommunications Act of 1996
Telecommunications Act of 1996
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major overhaul of United States telecommunications law in nearly 62 years, amending the Communications Act of 1934. This Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, was a major stepping stone towards the future of telecommunications, since this was the...

.

9/11

The September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...

 destroyed the small telephone exchange
Telephone exchange
In the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls...

 inside the World Trade Center
World Trade Center
The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The site is currently being rebuilt with five new...

 that served the Center, and damaged the company's largest exchange building, the Verizon Building
Verizon Building
The Verizon Building is a 32-story Art Deco building in New York City, located in Lower Manhattan. It is named for Verizon Communications, for which it is the headquarters. The building is located at 140 West Street, adjacent to the World Trade Center site and 7 World Trade Center, and is bounded...

 at 140 West Street, across Vesey Street. The destruction included cables under Vesey Street as well as inside plant
Inside plant
In telecommunication, the term inside plant has the following meanings:*All the cabling and equipment installed in a telecommunications facility, including the main distribution frame and all the equipment extending inward therefrom, such as PABX or central office equipment, MDF heat coil...

 damaged when I-beams and steel from the towers ran through the building. Service was disrupted to approximately 300,000 business and consumer voice circuits, 3,600,000 data circuits (including the New York Stock Exchange
New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at 13.39 trillion as of Dec 2010...

), and 10 cell towers.

Police Department headquarters lost telephone service, but the nearby NYTel building at 375 Pearl Street
375 Pearl Street
375 Pearl is a 32-story telephone switching building at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge....

 had its own small exchange which only lost part of its connections to the rest of the network. Madison Street was closed and cables run out the lower windows of the two buildings and along the pavement to bring immediate service to a few hundred police telephone lines.

Workers from throughout the country, including 3,000 Verizon employees plus non-Verizon employees, helped restore service, allowing the network to carry 230,000,000 calls during the first week following the attacks. During the restoration efforts, trunk cables were run out windows and down the side of the building, flowing through streets closed to traffic, until they found an undamaged manhole
Manhole
A manhole is an opening used to gain access to sewers or other underground structures, usually for maintenance.Manhole may also refer to:* Manhole , a metal band from Los Angeles* The Manhole, a computer game...

 for them to enter. DMS-100
DMS-100
The DMS-100 Switch is a line of Digital Multiplex System telephone exchange switches manufactured by Nortel Networks.The purpose of the DMS-100 Switch is to provide local service and connections to the PSTN public telephone network. It is designed to deliver services over subscribers' telephone...

and other exchange equipment was damaged and replaced the following year. Also the building was completely renovated restoring it to its former glory as corporate headquarters. In a ceremony on December 8, 2005 Verizon moved its corporate headquarters from 1095 Avenue of the Americas, to 140 West St.

External links

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