Tong Family

If you are watching Severance, then you know there is an iconic exterior shot. I almost choked when I looked at it and realized that not only had I worked in that building, but so had my Dad and brother. But, it is in Holmdel, NJ and was the site of so many inventions when Bell Laboratories (along with the IBM TJ Watson Research Laboratories) were where so many inventions from the transistor are created.

Sadly, after the AT&T Breakup, it became part of Lucent which became part of Nokia and eventually this amazing building was basically abandoned. Pre pandemic, they were turning parts of it into a startup factory and it is amazing how much is still there. Much of the land around it has been sold off for megamansions but enough remains of it to imagine what it was like in its heyday.

It was completed in 1962 and is in the National Historic Registry. I hope it lives on in more than just movies! It was designed Eero Saarinen a renown Finnish-American architect. It was a called the biggest mirror ever and had a huge complex of water features and a water tower that was shaped like a transistor that was literally 10 stories high.

Here it is in all its glory during the 20th anniversary celebration way back in 1980:

And here is the original video in the 1960s about the place:

And this is what it is like today: