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INTEGRATE Systems
Built in 1932 and then called The Commerce Building, it's no New York skyscraper. Only 16 stories tall, nonetheless the facility is huge - covering an entire city block, from 15th Street to 16th Street and from Eighth Avenue to Ninth Avenue. There is 2.8 million square feet of floor space, and in the beginning, it was reported as the second largest building in the world.
In the 1960s, the Port Authority of New York, the original builder, sold the building to a private interest.
It would be another 30 years before the building caught the eye of one of the leading developers and operators of telecommunications properties in the U.S., Taconic Investment Partners LLC. The founders, Paul Pariser and Charles Bendit, saw the building at 111 Eighth Avenue as having great potential for multiple company office space use.
New Security Plan Needed
The advantages that the building offers such high-tech entities are its 15-- foot ceilings, 23-foot column spacing and 200-pound floor loads, ideal for heavy racks of equipment.
The one amenity lacking, however, was an adequate security system. For decades, the building was open to anyone.
"It is a problematic building with four major tenant entrances, several loading dock entrances and several freight openings," says Andrew Nick, principal for Taconic."It is a big building, and the entrances are spread far apart."
The tenants include 35 telecommunications companies that specialize in telephone traffic, data traffic and switching and Web hosting. The building is also home to many non-technical corporations.
The investors hired Aggleton and Associates, an independent security consultancy in New York City, to assess the problem. Bob Hardy, vice president and senior consultant, led the task. "We did a risk assessment of the building and an in-depth study of the structure and its operations. We had to determine the staffing level of security people, how the building would be accessed by the public and the type of tenancy."
Building, Tenant Needs
The investors completed the design process, concentrating on the areas that were a concern to all parties. Each company would still provide its own access control within its area, and the parking garage security would still be maintained by an outsourced party. The actual access into the building, though,...