375 Pearl (also known as the Verizon Building and One Brooklyn Bridge Plaza) is a 32-story telephone switching building at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The building, which appears windowless but has several 3-foot-wide slits (0.91 m) (some with glass) running up the building, is the tallest building next to the Brooklyn Bridge and is featured in most photos of the bridge from the Brooklyn side. Verizon operations include a small DMS-100 switching system and a Switching Control Center System. The building's CLLI code, its identification in the telecommunications industry, is NYCMNYPS.
When it opened in 1975 for New York Telephone Company, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger decried it as the “most disturbing” of the phone company’s new switching centers because it “overwhelms the Brooklyn Bridge towers, thrusts a residential neighborhood into shadow and sets a tone of utter banality.”
The building played an important part in recovering service to the police Department in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In September 2007 it was announced that Taconic Partners bought the building from Verizon. Verizon will lease back floors 8 through 10. Taconic bought the 1.098-million-square-foot building (102,000 m2) for $172.05 million, which amounted to $185 a foot when property was selling in Manhattan for $500 a foot. Other appeals of the building are its 16- to 17-foot (5.2 m) ceilings and 39,000-square-foot (3,600 m2) floor plans as well as the naming rights. The Verizon logo currently tops the building.
Taconic had announced plans to dramatically change in the facade in which a curtain wall designed by Cook & Fox is to be built. The Times in reporting the news said:
- Paul E. Pariser, co-chief executive of Taconic, said a reporter had told him: “ ‘Mr. Pariser, you have a challenge cut out for you — turning a G.E. dishwasher into an office building.’ I like that challenge.”
In early June 2011, Sabey Data Center Properties, the largest privately held developer, owner, and operator of data centers in the United States purchased the deed in lieu of foreclosure from M&T bank for $120 million, considerably less than what Taconic had paid a few years earlier. Sabey intends to redevelop the property as a major Manhattan data center and technology building. The building is now referred to as Intergate.Manhattan.
John Sabey, President of Sabey Data Center Properties, said "As the few major existing data centers and carrier hotels in Manhattan are nearing capacity from space, power, and cooling perspectives, we view 375 Pearl as an asset uniquely positioned to offer a world class computing environment for those users with on-island data center needs. The building has all the bones – an abundance of power, a purpose-built structure, and tremendous prospects from a connectivity standpoint to be just that.”
On April 3, 2012, the UK's online version of The Daily Telegraph showed 375 Pearl Street as the second in a series of "the ugliest buildings in the world".
Famous quotes containing the words pearl and/or street:
“When Alexander Pope strolled in the city
Strict was the glint of pearl and gold sedans.
Ladies leaned out more out of fear than pity
For Pope’s tight back was rather a goat’s than man’s.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“And men left down their work and came,
And women with petticoats coloured like flame.
And little bare feet that were blue with cold,
Went dancing back to the age of gold,
And all the world went gay, went gay,
For half an hour in the street to-day.”
—“Seumas” “O’Sullivan” (1879–1958)