I was following the re-use of this building into modern smaller office spaces shortly before covid19 hit the commercial real estate market. I hope they're doing OK.
Spaces were getting leased and companies were moving in and then a vast number of things shifted to remote work/full work-from home, and I'm not sure to what extent they've really recovered.
I have a theory that the original placement of Bell Labs, back in the day, was chosen by the higher ranking executives to be conveniently close to their large homes in some leafy suburbs out in that particular part of NJ. It's not really what you could call a hotbed of tech innovation and local commute-distance talent pool nowadays, compared to locating a company in some retrofitted space in NYC.
Minor correction: although Edison had his first lab in Menlo Park (today's Edison NJ) for ten years, he later moved to a larger campus in West Orange NJ in order to be closer to NYC, and spent four decades there. They're about 25 miles apart, in different counties. But yes, lots of tech history throughout NJ!
In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, which at the time was the site of an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California.[4] While there, he earned the nickname "the Wizard of Menlo Park".[5] The Menlo Park lab was significant in that it was one of the first laboratories to pursue practical, commercial applications of research.[6] It was in his Menlo Park laboratory that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament. Christie Street in Menlo Park was one of the first streets in the world to use electric lights for illumination.
Bell Labs was active in this area going all the way back to the 1930s, where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field.
Also in this era, once you got a job at Bell Labs, then you were set for life...not getting filthy rich necessarily, but you could fully expect to spend your entire career with the one prestigious, stable, monopoly-supported employer, before retiring with a nice pension. As a result, the rank-and-file talent were happy to move and settle down in the towns surrounding these giant suburban/exurban campuses, which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.
Used for some of the earliest attempts at transatlantic C-band communications via geostationary satellites.
In the history of geostationary telecom satellite stuff the teleports near Holmdel are fairly important.
One of the other nearby noteworthy facilities is the giant teleport on Staten Island. Now all of the antennas and facilities have been removed and it's a vacant lot.
> which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.
Sounds a bit like the lifestyle from the late 1940s onwards for those in professional/scientific/research/engineering careers living in Los Alamos, NM or Oak Ridge, TN. Or the workforce for things like the Lincoln Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, etc.
Aside from solid pay, you also got to work with some very smart people, of diverse nationalities. My father worked for Western Electric (at the location outside of Princeton, NJ). WE's role was to take the BLs' R&D and make it market-worthy. While he didn't have an advanced degree, many of peers did, and his bosses PhDs. His co-workers were Asian, SE Asian, and Mexican. This was long before diversity was all the rage.
When I was a kid - early 70s give or take - they'd have an annual open house for the families. I still remember being introduced to computers. I remember seeing fiber and hearing "this is the future" when all there was was copper twisted pair.
It didn't realize it then but I was a lucky SOB :)
Can confirm. That was the life. (My Dad worked at Holmdel until the divestiture.)
I still remember visiting on the Christmas Eve open house they would hold every year, with a brass band playing carols in the big atrium and all kinds of tech goodies to check out.
Regarding GP's point, New Jersey actually has a pretty strong heritage in engineering. There was Edison of course, and RCA (including their research lab near Princeton that did a lot of defense work in WWII) and lots of smaller radio companies--don't forget that especially pre-WWII the economic geography of the US was a lot different and the radio "startups" of the day would design and manufacture right in urban areas of the East Coast.
Marconi set up shop in NJ in the early days -- in fact my Dad does a lot of work these days with a museum of early communications technology, located at an old Marconi transmitter site not too far from Holmdel (infoage.org).
Other parts of the Bell System were in New Jersey too, with offices, labs, and facilities spread all over the state (including the famous Long Lines NOC where they monitored the health of the long distance system in real time.)
There were (and still are) plenty of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that hired scientists and engineers.
But I'd say that in the postwar era until about 2000 most scientists and engineers didn't particularly aspire to live in or commute to NYC. The suburban life was the dream. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s it felt like all the technical work going on there was backend stuff for banks or dot-com startups with a media/marketing focus.
I presume wherever it is cheap and conventional without scaring off the workers themselves. I would've said Austin, TX as it was being groomed to be such a place but I am no longer sure about that partly because of how partisan it gets around there scaring off the programmers and partly because half of that was Elon betting on that location back when he had credibility.
Who knows what's next? Upstate NY maybe? Lots of cult bunkers there, might mesh positively with some of those weird almost cultish philosophies some of the more new-age SV tech companies seem to push.
I think the NJ location was discussed in the book "The Idea Factory" (or at least the Murray Hill location) - hard to imagine it as farmland with tons of open space compared to the NYC office! These days there are still a good number of legacy engineering companies in defense and telecom in the North Jersey area. There's a neat small-world feel to some of these places with all the people who scattered around after Lucent.
I believe so as well given the structure of the offices, they clearly described that the layout was designed in a way to allow for maximum quiet and concentration whilst enabling collaboration via the shared walk ways and common areas. It's a shame to see they've turned it into a glass walled hellscape.
Oh you're right, that does jog my memory of the book. To be fair, I believe the Murray Hill Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs) has this kind of layout, though I've only worked in one of the electronics lab areas and didn't really ever go to any offices.
I wish more office buildings were build like this. Beautiful!
I do like how the glass looks, but it could be distracting. If it was electrically frosting glass that was sound proof that might be the best of both worlds.
Not really, to the extent that Bell Labs undertook true basic research for its own sake, without much concern for any short/medium-term commercial potential. (No need to rock the boat commercially, while the parent corporation had a regulated monopoly to milk!)
Maybe some case could be made for Alphabet's "Other Bets" collectively, but...the Bell Labs column has nine Nobel Prizes in it...
Perhaps you could make a case that the DOE-era national labs, collectively, have a similar basic science mission, and their rise coincides with AT&T's decline.
Not quite, research for its own sake in that vein was attributed to the collapse of RCA, so most companies not in such a position didn't quite pursue it.
I would then only make gestures towards federal labs like DARPA, Los Alamos, NASA campuses, etc.
> compared to locating a company in some retrofitted space in NYC.
Speaking of that, Bell Labs' old NYC HQ [1] is an impressive set of buildings too! It was converted to the Westbeth artist live/work community in the late 60s [2], and they typically offer tours to the public during Open House New York weekend each year [3].
I love how these old, great pieces of architecture get a second life refurbished into some work of noble note. It's like a whale fall and all the little next-gen sea creatures feed on the giant carcass (house) of the old giant.
Such annoyances seem to be table stakes for modern media conglomerate sites these days. It's profoundly embarrassing to our species that even a publication like Fast Company purporting to be at the front edge of tech, business, and design, gives in to so much bloatware.
"Tri-state area" is more succinct than "New York City Metropolitan Area" and more people will understand it than the "Mid-Atlantic Region" (which is also physically a slightly different region).
I work at AT&T Labs. We often drive over to Bell Works for our lunch break; it's a lovely mixed used space, and also a chance to keep in touch with a part of AT&T history.
SV seems to have a little more depth to it. Were there many other high tech companies in the Holmdel region back in the 80s, or was this a little island of the future in a land of farms and Springsteen?
By depth I meant depth of the job market and community. As in, there is more than just one big employer, which is why I was asking if there were any other big tech companies in/near Holmdel than Bell
The glory of discovery will echo through the ages. Radio astronomy was invented in the Holmdel Bell Labs.
I remember reading a story of a scientist that had discovered a new element. He sprinkled it on his father's grave saying that it's half life of O(thousands) years would last longer than any other memorial be could build. Can't remember the guys name sadly.
Used to go there daily for a project a few years ago. Pretty interesting campus and spent some time walking the hallways. They had some ancient looking computers which was interesting.
Don't sleep on NJ. It has "the highest number of millionaires both per capita and per square mile in the U.S., and hosting more scientists and engineers per square mile than anywhere else in the world."
Not similar at all. If you are deciding between states/cities, then the states/cities’ debt burdens impact your tax liability and quality/quantity of government services received. NJ does not have the luxury of being able to print money.
Same situation on federal government level, but US apparently has quite a bit of advantage considering the strength of the currency. Theoretically, if there was a country similar to the US with less debt, then they would enjoy an advantage. In the US, that is not theory since there are many different comparable states.
I could come up with reasonable objections but the truth is I was miserable as a kid, and I associate that misery with New Jersey.
I still pull over across New Jersey for food - especially around Edison, where I order banquet amounts of Indian food from Ruby Ke Kitchen Se to take back to my chest freezer in the woods of northern New England.
Yeah I can understand that. I do not like going or staying at places with a negative emotional connection. A few highschool friends of mine that I want to college with had a negative experience at our highschool. They did not have nice things to say about the town we grew up in and did not want to be associated or live there. Not everyone. Many do maintain a strong positive connection with the town.
I personally do not like the Jersey Shore. I dont like going there even though many people around me love going there. I had a few negative experiences there as a teenager and young adult.
For many years I simply though of NJ as that stretch of highway south of NY, I guess the NJ turnpike with lots of large industrial plants. Then I drove west and realized it's also got a lot of toll roads.
Back around 83 I got to do a project at this facility working with a guy who built prototypes of consumer products. I was in middle school.
The project was to make a wireless joystick for the apple 2. You could go to the basement and fill out an order sheet and get any kind of electronic component. The order was filled on the spot while you stood there.
I didn’t know anything about the assembly written for the project. The mentor did all that. However I got to do all the wire wrapping and some of the other bits. It worked! Good times. No doubt this is one of the reasons I ended up as an engineer…
It was my first “real” office job and I just assumed all office buildings were that grandiose! Only later did I realize how fortunate I was..
Anyway I occasionally visit it now as Bell Works and am glad it has found a second life - hopefully one that lasts at least as long as its first incarnation.
p.s. I wrote that code in about a day, and then spent a month trying to figure out how to deploy it on the IBM-managed Windows NT IIS machines with only some ancient Perl available (5.005 maybe?) and no option to upgrade.
IIRC it involved printf-over-email debugging where the IT folks would try and deploy it, email me the errors, I’d iterate and we’d repeat.
Was a pretty valuable experience in some ways - good taste of enterprise computing realities…
I grew up near here and visit once in a while when I come to see my rents.
It’s a nice, large space. The holmdel public library has actually moved into it.
Not a huge fan of the surrounding McMansions they’ve built, but Bell Works itself is a good place to grab a bite, go for a walk, grab a drink - and of course to work.
Always wondered if the Holmdel area could’ve been SV, but I don’t think there was the same level of entrepreneurial risk taking as there was in the Valley.
I worked at a startup working with haptic touch screens, and got to participate in a student hack-a-thon with our hardware at this location around 2014-2015. At the time, it looked like the pictures here: https://metropolismag.com/projects/eero-saarinens-bell-labs-...
Got to spend the night in the building, and the most interesting part was wandering around into the offices that still had writing on the chalkboards/whiteboards lamenting the closure of the building and Bell Labs/Lucent. It was an amazing experience!
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadhttps://metropolismag.com/projects/eero-saarinens-bell-labs-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs
https://www.wired.com/2014/09/coupland-bell-labs/
I was following the re-use of this building into modern smaller office spaces shortly before covid19 hit the commercial real estate market. I hope they're doing OK.
Spaces were getting leased and companies were moving in and then a vast number of things shifted to remote work/full work-from home, and I'm not sure to what extent they've really recovered.
I have a theory that the original placement of Bell Labs, back in the day, was chosen by the higher ranking executives to be conveniently close to their large homes in some leafy suburbs out in that particular part of NJ. It's not really what you could call a hotbed of tech innovation and local commute-distance talent pool nowadays, compared to locating a company in some retrofitted space in NYC.
Edison, NJ is not far away and was definitely a hotbed of tech in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Thomas Edison).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_New_Jersey
In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, which at the time was the site of an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California.[4] While there, he earned the nickname "the Wizard of Menlo Park".[5] The Menlo Park lab was significant in that it was one of the first laboratories to pursue practical, commercial applications of research.[6] It was in his Menlo Park laboratory that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament. Christie Street in Menlo Park was one of the first streets in the world to use electric lights for illumination.
Also in this era, once you got a job at Bell Labs, then you were set for life...not getting filthy rich necessarily, but you could fully expect to spend your entire career with the one prestigious, stable, monopoly-supported employer, before retiring with a nice pension. As a result, the rank-and-file talent were happy to move and settle down in the towns surrounding these giant suburban/exurban campuses, which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.
Fun things like the Holmdel Horn Antenna too:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=holmdel+h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna
Used for some of the earliest attempts at transatlantic C-band communications via geostationary satellites.
In the history of geostationary telecom satellite stuff the teleports near Holmdel are fairly important.
One of the other nearby noteworthy facilities is the giant teleport on Staten Island. Now all of the antennas and facilities have been removed and it's a vacant lot.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/nyregion/staten-island-te...
Sounds a bit like the lifestyle from the late 1940s onwards for those in professional/scientific/research/engineering careers living in Los Alamos, NM or Oak Ridge, TN. Or the workforce for things like the Lincoln Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, etc.
When I was a kid - early 70s give or take - they'd have an annual open house for the families. I still remember being introduced to computers. I remember seeing fiber and hearing "this is the future" when all there was was copper twisted pair.
It didn't realize it then but I was a lucky SOB :)
I still remember visiting on the Christmas Eve open house they would hold every year, with a brass band playing carols in the big atrium and all kinds of tech goodies to check out.
Regarding GP's point, New Jersey actually has a pretty strong heritage in engineering. There was Edison of course, and RCA (including their research lab near Princeton that did a lot of defense work in WWII) and lots of smaller radio companies--don't forget that especially pre-WWII the economic geography of the US was a lot different and the radio "startups" of the day would design and manufacture right in urban areas of the East Coast.
Marconi set up shop in NJ in the early days -- in fact my Dad does a lot of work these days with a museum of early communications technology, located at an old Marconi transmitter site not too far from Holmdel (infoage.org).
Other parts of the Bell System were in New Jersey too, with offices, labs, and facilities spread all over the state (including the famous Long Lines NOC where they monitored the health of the long distance system in real time.)
There were (and still are) plenty of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that hired scientists and engineers.
But I'd say that in the postwar era until about 2000 most scientists and engineers didn't particularly aspire to live in or commute to NYC. The suburban life was the dream. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s it felt like all the technical work going on there was backend stuff for banks or dot-com startups with a media/marketing focus.
Who knows what's next? Upstate NY maybe? Lots of cult bunkers there, might mesh positively with some of those weird almost cultish philosophies some of the more new-age SV tech companies seem to push.
I do like how the glass looks, but it could be distracting. If it was electrically frosting glass that was sound proof that might be the best of both worlds.
Maybe some case could be made for Alphabet's "Other Bets" collectively, but...the Bell Labs column has nine Nobel Prizes in it...
Speaking of that, Bell Labs' old NYC HQ [1] is an impressive set of buildings too! It was converted to the Westbeth artist live/work community in the late 60s [2], and they typically offer tours to the public during Open House New York weekend each year [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building_(Ma...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westbeth_Artists_Community
[3] https://ohny.org/place/westbeth-artist-housing/
https://www.fastcompany.com/90762774/jessica-lee-gagne-sever...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_Museum
It's interesting in general how that show was produced in the 'tri-state area'.
(Not sure how else to call this - the urbanized junction of NJ/NY/CT radiating outwards from NYC)
I have had 3 near collisions in the past year. My friends, about the same.
Be warned
It wasn't even headquarters for Bell Labs.
A reminder....all glory is fleeting!
there would have been no need for silicon if it hadn't been for the things invented at bell labs.
as i understand it was in a class of its own.
I remember reading a story of a scientist that had discovered a new element. He sprinkled it on his father's grave saying that it's half life of O(thousands) years would last longer than any other memorial be could build. Can't remember the guys name sadly.
Also -- in terms of "empires" -- before Bell Telephone, you might be able to point to Edison's Menlo Park lab.
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/05/nj-state-owes-bondho...
Same situation on federal government level, but US apparently has quite a bit of advantage considering the strength of the currency. Theoretically, if there was a country similar to the US with less debt, then they would enjoy an advantage. In the US, that is not theory since there are many different comparable states.
Warren Buffett has commented as much
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/25/full-transcript-billionaire-...
I still pull over across New Jersey for food - especially around Edison, where I order banquet amounts of Indian food from Ruby Ke Kitchen Se to take back to my chest freezer in the woods of northern New England.
Plus, New Jersey begat WFMU - god bless them.
I personally do not like the Jersey Shore. I dont like going there even though many people around me love going there. I had a few negative experiences there as a teenager and young adult.
The Gabagoogleplex
The project was to make a wireless joystick for the apple 2. You could go to the basement and fill out an order sheet and get any kind of electronic component. The order was filled on the spot while you stood there.
I didn’t know anything about the assembly written for the project. The mentor did all that. However I got to do all the wire wrapping and some of the other bits. It worked! Good times. No doubt this is one of the reasons I ended up as an engineer…
http://www.extropia.com/hacks/webcal/WCfacility.html
It was my first “real” office job and I just assumed all office buildings were that grandiose! Only later did I realize how fortunate I was..
Anyway I occasionally visit it now as Bell Works and am glad it has found a second life - hopefully one that lasts at least as long as its first incarnation.
IIRC it involved printf-over-email debugging where the IT folks would try and deploy it, email me the errors, I’d iterate and we’d repeat.
Was a pretty valuable experience in some ways - good taste of enterprise computing realities…
Got to spend the night in the building, and the most interesting part was wandering around into the offices that still had writing on the chalkboards/whiteboards lamenting the closure of the building and Bell Labs/Lucent. It was an amazing experience!