Marconi Tower

One of the many upcoming projects I have planned is focused on documenting what still remains of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company’s network of telegraph receiver stations in the United States. During my research I uncovered numerous sites which remain in various states of preservation, stretching up the East Coast from New Jersey to Massachusetts. I was driving around Binghamton, NY while working on a different project about IBM Endicott when I came across a rusted tower with an NY State Historic Marker nestled under it. Not far from the Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western terminal, the marker reads “ERECTED NOVEMBER 1913 BY GUGLIELMO MARCONI TO TEST THE POSSIBILITY OF TRANSMITTED TELEGRAPHIC SIGNALS TO MOVING TRAINS ALONG THE LACKAWANNA RR”.

Patented by Marconi in 1900, wireless communication was still in it’s infancy in November 1912. Less than a year before Marconi’s experiment in Binghamton, Marconi Wireless Telegraph operators onboard the Titanic spent most of their time sending messages from the ship’s wealthy passengers back to shore as a novelty of sorts. The wireless telegraph later proved itself a lifesaving technology when the receiving station at South Wellfleet, MA relayed news of the Titanic’s sinking to RMS Carpathia, facilitating the rescue of survivors left stranded in the Atlantic.

Marconi built two sets of towers in 1913 to test the feasibility of receiving wireless telegraph messages at high speeds. Until this point, the radio telegraph had been used to communicate with ships across great distances, but never something like a train. On November 27, 1913, a 350 word message was successfully transmitted to a Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western railroad train traveling 60 mph using the two test stations in Binghamton and Scranton, PA.

While the experiment was a success, the system Marconi envisioned never came to fruition. Fixed stations were to be spaced every 50 miles along the track to combat poor reception onboard trains, thus incurring prohibitively high infrastructure costs. The railroad would completely replace Marconi’s equipment with radio telephony transmission towers in Hoboken and Buffalo, establishing their system in 1914. While almost all evidence of this experiment is long gone, the rusted remains of one tower that once supported the 150 foot aerial needed to conduct Marconi’s experiment still stands today in Binghamton.

The George Eastman House

I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time in Rochester between visiting the George Eastman Museum, working on my upcoming Kodak series, and exploring the city in general. The George Eastman Museum occupies the original mansion George Eastman lived in until his death in 1932 and is one of my favorite places to visit in Rochester. The mansion was bequeathed to the University of Rochester but was turned over to the George Eastman House museum and became it’s permanent home in 1949. The mansion was built in the Georgian Revival style by Mr. Eastman with all the modern conveniences of the day: electricity, telephones, a central vacuum system, an elevator, and a massive Aeolian pipe organ. Fun fact about the organ - the Aeolian Organ Company’s manufacturing plant was just down the rail line from where I grew up. Located in Garwood, NJ, it was torn down recently for apartments as part of the building craze that seems to be impacting all towns along NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley line. The castle-like facade with the carved stone “Aeolian Organ Company” signage looks to be preserved though, while the apartments themselves haven’t made much progress.

George Eastman, worth millions at the time of his death, spared no expense in the construction of his estate. While he never married, he was incredibly close with his mother Maria and she lived with him until her death in 1907. Given she spend the last two years of her life in a wheelchair and Eastman himself suffered from debilitating pain late in life, the elevator was an undoubtedly useful feature. Small details like the ornate inlaid stained glass depicting different modes of transportation including cars, steam ships, and hot air balloons adorn the windows of the billiard room. Painted murals of animals seen on Eastman’s exotic hunting expeditions trim the built-in bookcases of the library. I found the conservatory, flooded with natural light, particularly spectacular. The space consumes both floors of the building and is notable for a mounted elephant head, likely a trophy acquired by Eastman’s himself. Outside the mansion are multiple gardens, which I hope to visit when the plants are in bloom and the renovation of the east lawn are completed.

Fort Stanwix

Fort Stanwix National Monument, managed by the National Park Service, is a modern day recreation of the circa 1762 Revolutionary War fort. The reconstruction was completed as part of urban revitalization efforts in 1974 atop the original fort’s location, then the historic downtown section of Rome, NY. It was a unseasonably hot day in early fall when I visited, and there were few people at the fort. I had the opportunity to speak with a ranger about the fort’s construction, and she explained how the city of Rome, NY asked the NPS to come in and reconstruct the fort. Congress authorized the National Monument in 1935, but the real push for its construction came with the Revolutionary War fervor of the bicentennial. The National Parks Service, not in the business of bulldozing historic structures (of which downtown Rome had many examples), politely declined the city’s initial request to bulldoze the site and reconstruct the fort. The city used eminent domain to demolish the dilapidated downtown section anyway, and a 3 year archeological survey of the property commenced before construction began. The fort was opened in 1976 for the bicentennial and construction was wrapped up in 1978.

So why is Fort Stanwix a National Monument? The story begins back in 1777 when Continental forces occupied the fort and repelled the British, earning the nickname of “the fort that never surrendered” after enduring a prolonged siege. The fort was eventually abandoned after the war and razed as the city of Rome expanded with the success of the Eerie Canal. While I was only able to poke my head inside recreated areas of the fort like the barracks and officers quarters due to COVID-19 precautions, I was impressed by the craftsmanship put into the reconstruction. I wonder if there will be another resurgence of interest in the Revolutionary War when the tricentennial rolls around. I’ll be 80 in 2076, so hopefully I’ll still be around to experience it. With so many historic sites from that time period in the tri-state area, I’d be curious to see what other projects might gain traction if there is a resurgence in Revolutionary War interest.

The Holmdel Horn Antenna

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.

Bell Laboratories - Holmdel

I somehow completely overlooked the former research campus of Bell Labs, known today as Bell Works, on my last visit to the Holmdel, NJ area. I was researching another relic of the company for a blog post, the Holmdel Horn Antenna, when I realized this place was a mere 3 miles down the road. After kicking myself for not stopping in when I was so close by, I made a dedicated trip there while home for Thanksgiving.

To understand the history behind the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, you first need to know a little background on Bell Labs itself. Founded in 1925 by AT&T and Western Electric, a combined 4,000 engineers from the two companies formed Bell Telephone Laboratories to study communications technology. Different groundbreaking discoveries like CCD technology, residual microwave background radiation (proof of the Big Bang), the Unix operating system, and the C programming language can be attributed to Bell Labs researchers. The research organization changed hands as acquisitions and divestiture took hold in the 1990s, leaving Bell Labs in the hands of Lucent Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent, and finally Nokia.

This complex was left disused in the early 2000s and sold to Somerset Development LLC in 2012 after Nokia Bell Labs consolidated their operations in Murray Hill, NJ. Construction started on the building in 1959 and later expansions totaled 2 million + sq ft of laboratory space. The architect, Eero Saarinen, also designed other notable modernist landmarks like the St. Louis Arch and the Dulles International Terminal in Washington, D.C.

Unlike most historic places I visit which are abandoned and decaying, Bell Works has a new lease on life. Some of the surrounding land has been leveled for housing developments, but the trademark transistor water tower and central office building remain. Inside is a mixed-use development which contains a branch of the county library, co-working spaces, and various eateries open to the public. There was some sort of Christmas party going on when I visited and a 5k run happening outside. Despite the redevelopment, key architectural features of the building remain unaltered - namely the cavernous courtyard covered in skylights which runs the length of the building. All 5 floors open on this courtyard, the scale of which is an incredible sight to behold. If you ever make a visit to Bell Works, try Booskerdoo Coffee & Baking Co. I had a sesame bagel and iced coffee and would happily eat there again.

I came across some traces of the original AT&T Bell Labs research activities while taking a drive around the elliptical perimeter road that rings the central office building. The AT&T Global Product Compliance Laboratory and nearby Ocean Simulation Facility have been repurposed as a landscaping company’s garage. A transistor shaped water tower stands guard near the main entrance on Crawfords Corner Road, paying homage to the Bell Labs researchers who invented the transistor itself back in 1947. While I’m a bit disheartened to see those dreaded Toll Brothers developments encroaching on the sweeping fields of grass that lead into Bell Works, it’s far too often that I find out about a place like this long after it’s been torn down. I’m glad that the township was able to find another use for such an interesting piece of architecture and instituted a redevelopment plan that seems to be working.

1939 & 1964 New York World's Fair

The 1939 and 1964 Worlds Fair found a home in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, situated a short subway ride away from Manhattan on what was then the IRT Flushing line. The park was built atop reclaimed land, similar to what would be done years later in the construction of Freshkills Park on Staten Island. Starting in 1907, coal ash and other street debris from Brooklyn were delivered via rail to the Corona Dump. This material was used to fill in the pre-existing salt marsh that was a haven for mosquitoes during the summer months. While the original plans for the site were to convert the reclaimed land into another Long Island City-esque port, the scarcity of materials brought on by the demands of WWI put those plans on hold. The Parks Department stepped in when the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company’s contract expired in 1933, and the site was selected in 1935 to host the 1939 Worlds Fair.

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is still one of the largest parks by land area in the New York City Parks system, taking the 4th spot behind Pelham Bay, Green Belt, and Van Cortlandt Park. Worlds Fairs were temporary in nature, and the construction methods used for the various structures that sprung from the ash in 1939 and 1964 largely reflected this. The Trylon and Perisphere, centerpieces of the 1939 Worlds Fair, were built of plaster board. Only two buildings survived the 1939 Worlds Fair - the New York City pavilion (now the Queens Museum), and the Belgium exhibition building (moved by Virginia Union University to Richmond, Virginia). The New York City pavilion was repurposed for the 1969 Worlds Fair and sits behind the Unisphere, the large steel centerpiece that replaced the Perisphere of 1939.

I found myself in a Long Island City hotel back in October with my shiny new Sony RX100VA, wondering what I could shoot before paying a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. I’d always planned visit to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, but it was just so out of the way that I couldn’t justify the trip. Beyond a few obvious landmarks in the park, you have to look closely to find remnants of the Worlds Fairs that were the impetus behind its construction. The New York State pavilion, with it’s towering observation decks overshadowing the pavilion below, still stands where it did in 1964. The brightly colored roof panels that made up the canopy shielding the “Tent of Tomorrow” are long gone, but the entire structure has received a fresh coat of paint within the past few years. The New York City pavilion, bearing a cornerstone dating it to 1939, is now the Queens Museum. The museum also operates the Theaterama, a third component of the New York State pavilion.

I can only imagine how spectacular it must’ve been to see either of these fairs in action, before the proverbial death of the American industrial giants who sponsored it like RCA, Kodak, General Motors, Bell Systems, Westinghouse, and others. While I doubt we’ll ever see another Worlds Fair or similar exhibition of this scale in the United States, I hope that maybe one day Flushing Meadows-Corona Park will once again have the chance to show us a sparkling view of the future as it did in 1939 and 1964.