New York Telephone - 9/11

9/11

The September 11, 2001, attacks destroyed the small telephone exchange inside the World Trade Center that served the Center, and damaged the company's largest exchange building, the Verizon Building at 140 West Street, across Vesey Street. The destruction included cables under Vesey Street as well as inside plant 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), and 10 cell towers.

Police Department headquarters lost telephone service, but the nearby NYTel building at 375 Pearl Street 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 for them to enter. DMS-100 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.