One of the many ways that I research new locations to shoot is by combing through properties listed on the National Register. These properties have a level of historical significance and are often nominated through the hard work of history loving folks like myself. I was sifting through sites listed in Monmouth County, NJ when I saw something odd that immediately caught my attention - a property listed as the “Horn Antenna”. Nestled atop a hill overlooking the Garden State Parkway, the Horn Antenna sits in a mothballed state on the former Bell Telephone Laboratories (Crawford Hill) Facility in Holmdel, NJ. I decided to take a trip this past fall to Holmdel and document what was left of the site.
Fabricated mostly on-site by Bell engineers under the direction of Mr. A. B. Crawford, the giant radio telescope was designed by astronomers to detect radio waves bounced off Echo balloon satellites. In 1965, Dr. Arno Penzias and Dr. Robert Wilson were conducting research with the antenna when they stumbled across the residual microwave background radiation that resulted from what we now know as the Big Bang. Publishing their research alongside three astrophysicists from Princeton University, Penzias and Wilson were able to detect the tremendous blast of radiation released by the Big Bang which the astrophysicists had theorized. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery in 1978.
The Horn Antenna and the Crawford Hill Facility itself were mothballed when research operations were consolidated to the global headquarters of Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. Crawford Hill was an annex of the larger Bell Labs Holmdel Complex located a short drive away, known today as Bell Works. I’ve also visited this behemoth of an office building, which you can read about in my Bell Works blog post. Researching the history of the antenna gave me the inspiration for some ongoing projects I’m working on around other former American titans of industry like General Electric, Westinghouse, Kodak, Xerox, and more.
All equipment from inside the antenna and the nearby utility shed which housed the controls has been stripped out. The facility was sold by Nokia Bell Labs in early 2020, and the site’s future remains uncertain. A decaying 7 meter dish antenna, workshops, and towers for communications and radar equipment dot the landscape as reminders of the research once conducted at Crawford Hill. I’m not sure when exactly Nokia Bell Labs abandoned the site, but I did find a laminated sign warning that the locker rooms for the volleyball pits were closed due to COVID-19. This mean that somebody occasionally visited the facilities until 2020 at the latest, but both visits I made in 2021 showed the complex abandoned. The Horn Antenna represents the heyday of communications research and design in America, a victim of the mergers and acquisitions that have whittled away at Bell Labs and shuttered the Crawford Hill Facility. I’m just glad I was able to document things before any significant redevelopment erased what is left of this important piece of scientific history.
