Ecuring a 50-story building

Doors and Hardware, March, 2007 by Michael Fickes

SINCE SEPT. 11, TENANTS ENTERING office buildings in New York City often face two, three, and four card readers tying into multiple access control systems. These aesthetically questionable banks of card readers tend to confuse tenants rushing to work--"Tell me again, which reader am I supposed to use?" Tenants who puzzle over the decision and then get it wrong can clog other building systems with invalid readings and drive security directors nuts, not to mention delaying those waiting in line behind them.

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The simplest solution to this problem--assigning certain elevator banks to certain tenants--rarely works for long, given the organic nature of multi-tenant office leases, which grow and shrink over time.

At One New York Plaza in the city's financial district, for example, five elevator banks transport tenants up and down the 50-story, 2.4-million-sq.-ft. building. In the early 1990s, when Prudential Insurance moved into the property, the company asked the landlord to install access-controlled turnstiles at two of the building's five elevator banks. These elevator banks near the south entrance to the building became the Prudential lobby, and the other three elevator banks served other tenants. One was reserved for floors leased by Goldman Sachs. The remaining two banks served various tenants, including a large national law firm called Fried Frank, overflow from Goldman Sachs and Prudential, and a handful of smaller tenants.

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Sept. 11 prompted Goldman Sachs to work with the owner of the building, Trizec Properties Inc., to install card access turnstiles at the elevator bank dedicated to their floors. "We saw an opportunity to expand access control to the building's remaining two elevator banks," says Joseph Syslo, the property manager for the building.

But the opportunity raised challenges. Goldman Sachs and Prudential both required that employees from regional offices visiting One New York Plaza be able to use their cards to access the building's turnstiles. A system adding access control turnstiles to the remaining elevator banks would have to accommodate overflow tenants from both Goldman Sachs and Prudential. In addition, Fried Frank wanted to extend its existing office access system to turnstiles fronting those elevator banks.

Each tenant used different systems. Fried Frank employed Interlogix Casi, a General Electric company based in Boca Raton, Fla.; Goldman Sachs used NexWatch of Fremont, Calif.; and Prudential had a system made by Geoffrey Industries of Parsippany, N.J.

And what about the smaller tenants? For them, Syslo planned to provide an access control system manufactured by Software House of Lexington, Mass. At that point, One New York Plaza would have four access control systems. The only common system was the turnstiles, supplied by Tomsed Corp. of Lillington, N.C.

Neither Syslo nor the tenants wanted multiple readers. And Syslo didn't want to install a single building system that would require his staff to administer cards and access authorizations for thousands of employees from a half dozen companies.

Syslo asked Kroll Inc. to recommend an alternative--something that would enable turnstile readers to communicate with each user's particular access control system. Kroll developed a splitter capable of routing signals to individual systems, but this solution couldn't distinguish one system from another and would have sent all card reads to all systems, clogging each with invalid reads.

Searching for a solution, Kroll came upon a universal reader interface developed by Geoffrey Industries. "Shortly after Sept. 11, we engineered this board to handle this kind of application," says Kevin Deane, an engineer with Geoffrey. "No one wants to put two and three readers on a turnstile, and routing a single reader to multiple systems allows everyone to see all the transactions."

The universal reader interface solves both problems by accepting information from various readers, distinguishing among them, and routing them to the appropriate systems.

Each of the cards used by the four building systems talks in a Wiegand format but in different bit patterns, which made it possible to distinguish one signal from another, according to William McKool, vice president of business development with Corporate Security Services Inc. The Edison, N.J., security firm engineered and installed the single-card turnstile system in One New York Plaza and also coordinated the work of integrating each of the building's four access control systems with the turnstile reader.

"We used a NexWatch reader at the turnstiles," says McKool. "This reader accepts cards from each of the four systems used in the building."

Because the reader recognizes all the cards, it can transmit card information to the universal reader interface located in an equipment closet below the main floor of the building. The universal board has four different outputs and intelligent circuitry that routes incoming signals to particular output ports, by distinguishing between the bit patterns of the various signals. "When you order a board, you first send us your cards," Deane says. "We configure the board so that certain bit patterns flow to certain output ports. The board filters the information like an intelligent multiplexer."