TWO Brooklyn telephone buildings separated by only a block are nevertheless eons apart in their architecture: primly Beaux-Arts from 1898 at Willoughby and Lawrence Streets and a sizzling Art Deco skyscraper from 1930 at Willoughby and Bridge.
In 1930, its successor company moved a block away to an Art Deco tower.
A faceted entrance.
Both were designated landmarks in 2004. The Deco building has been converted into luxury condos called the BellTel Lofts, while the earlier building is still used as offices.
New York and New Jersey Telephone and Telegraph was founded in 1883, only five years after the commercial introduction of the telephone in New York. The telephone quickly became critical for many businesses. For example, in the New York’s Industries directory of 1885, Luckenbach Coast and Harbor Towing, a tugboat company, advertised that it took orders in its South Street office by “mail, telegraph or telephone.”
Just as major Internet companies now occupy sumptuous headquarters — consider Frank Gehry’s sail-like building for IAC in Chelsea or Amazon.com’s elaborately restored Art Deco high-rise in Seattle — the telephone companies built lavishly a century or so ago.
The crisp, impeccably detailed eight-story building at Willoughby and Lawrence was the headquarters for New York and New Jersey Telephone and Telegraph. Rudolphe L. Daus, born in Mexico and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, produced a robust structure dominated by six great three-story arches.
In contrast, the ornamentation was delicate and inventive. Some of it was wonderfully classical, like the cresting around the single bull’s-eye window on the rounded corner on the seventh floor. But around the limestone doorway, amid the usual eagles and shields, are depictions of wall-mounted telephones of the period with the sinuous wires for the earpieces arranged like wreaths.
According to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the first and second floors were devoted to supply and repair, the fourth through seventh floors to offices, and the top floor to switching equipment for the company’s 3,500 subscribers.
The room housing the operators’ switchboards was in the heart of the building, at a remove from city streets, to keep the air as clean as possible.
In 1899, The Eagle reported that the operators were all young women whose starting pay was $3.50 a week. That suggests few of them had their own telephones: service cost $3.50 a month, although a four-party line was only $2.
In 1930, what had evolved into the Long Island headquarters of the New York Telephone Company moved one block away, to Willoughby and Bridge Streets. By this time the architectural firm of Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker had been designing telephone buildings for two decades. For the new headquarters, Ralph Walker, a partner in the firm, created a mesmerizing tower with faceted planes of orange brick, mottled in color so it reads like an undulating tapestry.
Telephone operations were discontinued at Mr. Walker’s building only a few years ago, and it has now been converted to 232 condominiums, priced at $540,000 to just over $3 million.
Down the street, tenants at the older telephone building are doctors, dentists and nonprofits. The ASA Institute, the college that occupies the ground floor, advertises its presence on the orange canopy out front.
Albert Srour, who came to New York as a youth to escape the civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s, bought the building, known as 81 Willoughby, in 1990.
He said that he had taken care of “all the small things,” like the elevator, and larger issues as well. He had the facade cleaned, and because pigeons had gotten under the cornice, it had to be cleaned out and repaired.
Mr. Srour did not oppose the building’s designation by the Landmarks Preservation Commission four years ago, but he said that he was sometimes restless “under their control.”
He explained: “They like to be picky. We didn’t care what color the windows were, but they took three weeks to tell us what they wanted.”
Lisi de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the commission, said that was the usual time for processing permits. Still, Mr. Srour said, “I love this building, so I didn’t mind it being a landmark.”