Old Western Union Building Becomes a Condo

A former Western Union Telegraph Co building in center city Philadelphia has been converted into luxury condos (per Real Estate section, Phila Inquirer, 12/23/05). It was built in the 1920s and used until the late 1960s. Sale prices range from $346k to $2.6 million.

formatting link
A number of old industrial and commercial buildings in downtown Philadelphia are being converted into residences. A former major Bell Telephone building at 1835 Arch St was sold, and I believe the former

1960's Bell of Pa headquarters at One Parkway was sold too. (I always thought One Parkway was an ugly example of 1960's style.)

Good thing for them I'm not living there. I'd get on the Condo Board and make it "authentic" Western Union, with Teletypewriters in each unit and maybe even a Morse code key/sounder. Imagine the residents when they discover their 1920s style telephone set is not for decoration but rather the phone they have to use, and their Internet* access is by Model 28 Teletype at 75 baud.

Seriously, I have mixed feelings about all these building conversions. On the one hand it is good because otherwise empty buildings are being put to good use and the people buying them are affluent and the city desperately needs them. But on the other hand I'd rather see these buildings used for their original purpose -- to create wealth. Economic wealth is created when we take raw materials and convert them into a useable finished product. Merely moving finished goods and money from one place to another doesn't create anything. Where do the goods that were once made in these buildings now come from? This is a factor our foreign balance of trade deficit is so high -- we have outsiders do our manufacturing for us.

  • As an aside, is "Internet" properly capitalized or not? I'm not sure how the word usage falls into the rules of grammar. When we speak of something generically, as in 'I'm taking the train to work today", we use lower case for train. But if speaking of a specific brand, "I'm taking the Santa Fe Railroad to work today", the word "Railroad" is capitalized because it is part of the Santa Fe name. We don't capitalize computer as in "I'm working on the computer". But should we capitalize the internet ("I'm working on the Internet)?
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The same thing happened in Chicago. The old Illinois Bell headquarters building at 225 West Randolph and 212 West Washington Street (different sides to the same block-wide building) I am told was converted to condominiums. I do not know, having not been in downtown Chicago since 1999 except for one occassion in late 2001 when I went to the 'sing-along Messiah' at Orchestra Hall that Christmas. I did not stick around afterward, just went and got my bus at Greyhound to come back to Independence.

And you asked how to properly case the word 'internet'. Actually Lisa, there are two different words, each spelled the same way and pronounced the same way, but different. There is upper-case /I/ Internet and lower-case /i/ internet. Originally, upper-case Internet was the connecting mechanism between sites in the network of sites which formed the Internet, a collection of ARPA sites and (what we now refer to as EDUcational ('.edu') sites but they were not called 'whatever.edu' in those days; just 'whatever'. So 'whatever' and 'whatever else' and 'somewhere else' were connected to other places in the MILitary network ('.mil) and GOVernment networks ('.gov') [but they did not call those '.mil' or '.gov' either in those days; they were part of the {A}dvanced {R}esearch -- ARPA thing.] ARPA and those universities connected through the upper-case Internet. There was also BITnet ([B]ecause [I]'s [T]ime Network which was another bunch of of schools. BITnet did not interconnect with Internet except through a few 'gateway' locations. That was late 1970's through middle 1980's.

To get this Digest out each day, I did it on a machine called 'eecs at nwu' which was Northwestern University in Evanston, IL because Evanston was within my unlimited calling package from Illinois Bell. From eecs I could 'rlogin' to the predessor of massis which was a machine called 'xx' as I recall. But I had to have an entry on my mailing list called 'telecom at nwu.bitnet' so that the BITnet subscribers could get their copies. Many _very major_ corporations (such as IBM) also were on BITnet. All the above comprised the upper case /I/nternet.

Around 1993-94 when the guy passed on who was more or less the coordinator for the whole thing, VP Al ('the bore') Gore invented the lower case /i/ internet which was to interconnect with the upper case /I/ Internet and anything else which came along down the stream. The original ARPA had an Acceptable Spam -- err, Use Policy which dictated what people could and could not do on ARPA sites, and by extension, the Internet. All that fell by the wayside once the guy was dead and out of the way; Al Gore and his bastard child ICANN took over the newly created lower case /i/ internet. Once the lawyers in that firm in Washington, DC gave birth to ICANN, the rule was changed to 'anything goes' on internet, since as any right-thinking person would explain to you, 'we cannot dictate what anyone does on their site'. There was no more room to have an AUP because that would involve dictating what people were 'allowed to do.'

So the short answer to your question is that 'Internet' was the older, and original interconnection between sites, and 'internet' is what we are stuck with now. Both casings of the word are acceptable, IMO. PAT]

Reply to
hancock4
Loading thread data ...

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.