The birthplace of the cell phone and countless other high-tech innovations has been saved from the wrecking ball.
A developer was planning to raze the former Bell Labs facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, to make way for new office buildings. But when researchers got wind of the plan, they bombarded the company, Preferred Real Estate Investments Inc. in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, with e-mails. And more than 100 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including a dozen Nobel laureates, signed a letter to the governor, the mayor, and the developer, urging the preservation of the 44-year-old building designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen.
The campaign worked. Last month, Preferred announced that it will refurbish the original 50,000-square-meter building, with its glass facade and transistor-shaped water tower. "These are smart people, and we sat up and listened to them," says Preferred spokesperson Scott Tattar.
Although the building will remain as office space, Bell Labs' best and brightest dispersed long ago, after the government-ordered breakup of the AT&T monopoly in 1984, notes Nobelist Douglas Osheroff of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California: "The real crime is that Bell Labs itself wasn't preserved."
