Turning an Art Deco landmark erected 85 years ago into a high-capacity data hub might seem less daunting in a building that was the former headquarters of Western Union Co. But the 1-million-sq-ft structure at 60 Hudson St. in Manhattan—which once housed 70 million ft of wire and 30 miles of conduit, and where nearly all undersea telegraph cables from Europe plugged into the U.S.—still needs a massive transformation to fit its new role as a modern data nerve center.
The historic brick tower designed by Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker in the late 1920s was a technological marvel of its day, but it can't support the hundreds of thousands of pounds of data equipment, generators, cooling towers, switchgear and transformers for the $100-million DataGryd Data Centers project underway at the location, says Justin Hegedus, project manager at Eipel Engineering Group.