Tag Archives: telecommunications history

Zapped! Pittsburgh microwave sites

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Last Fall I was driving around taking pictures of mobster graves and sites associated with organized crime history in Pittsburgh when I spotted an old microwave tower on a hilltop. It was breaking the horizon in an otherwise ordinary suburban landscape. Nearby, as is common with many first- and second-generation microwave towers building in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were radio and television broadcast towers and cellphone towers.

Former AT&T microwave tower site, December 2020. It is flanked by a television broadcast tower (Sinclair Broadcasting) and a monopole (cellphone).

I have long had an interest in the history of telecommunications history infrastructure: towers and antenna sites. The old microwave tower in Pittsburgh’s North Hills was easily recognizable from a distance as a type built by AT&T during the company’s first microwave network buildout. Towers like these were built on hilltops and mountainsides throughout the United States to create a line-of-sight antenna network carrying voice, television, and data at the speed of light. Continue reading →

The South-View Cemetery view

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Does a cell tower built across the street from a historic cemetery adversely affect the property? If there are significant visual impacts, as this article suggests, could historic preservation laws and regulatory reviews have prevented or reduced the impacts?south-view-01

South-View Cemetery is Atlanta, Georgia’s oldest and arguably most historic African American cemetery. Yet, as Georgia State University historian Richard Laub noted in a 2010 interview with alt-weekly Creative Loafing, it’s an “unjustly ignored site” that doesn’t receive the same amount of support, recognition, and respect that its better-known Atlanta counterpart, Oakland Cemetery, gets. The article for which Laub was interviewed was titled, “Atlanta’s forgotten black history.” Continue reading →

Frankenpines, Monopalms, and the Jolly Green Giant

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I have been interested in concealed telecommunications sites since I first began working on regulatory compliance for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensees struggling to understand the complexities of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. This is the first of a series of posts on concealed telecommunications infrastructure and the American landscape.

Monopines. Whitemarsh Township, Pennsylvania.

Continue reading →