[r_klancer]

Well the Bell Labs Holmdel complex is often used as an example of the death and creative reuse of the suburban office park, and I guess this is the flip side.

In the long run I guess splendid isolation turned out to be no match for being in a walkable city with a research university, research hospitals, major pharma headquarters (J&J) right in town, and a train station across the street that goes right to New York, EWR, and Princeton.

Still, I'm suffering a bit of vertigo that Bell Labs (or what's left of it) is moving to where the old Rutgers Bookstore and Albany St parking garage used to be (!) and that suddenly the gritty, grungy New Brunswick I used to bum around 20 years ago looks more like Kendall Square, where I work now. (And which also didn't used to look like it does now, I suppose.)

(Disclaimer: this is a super local story for me; my dad worked at Bell Labs in Holmdel, and I'm a third generation Rutgers grad whose mom grew up walking into downtown New Brunswick, and I probably spent way too much of my early 20s at the Starbucks on George Street and the Melody Bar, both RIP.)

[euroderf]

I worked in N Jersey in the late 70s and I had coworkers who'd worked for Bell. They said that most tech people in Jersey had been thru Bell at one time or another. Does this match your experience of the area ?

[stn8188]

It really blew my mind how much Bell Labs influenced the area. I had my internship at Ericsson in Piscataway (formerly Telcordia, formerly part of Bell). I later worked for a defense contractor that came out of the Bell/Lucent/Alcatel-Lucent line. It feels like everyone I crossed paths with knew everyone else, and that they all had roots in some part of the Bell System.

[agapon]

Hoes Lane!