Deep inside a once active limestone mine in Rosendale, New York, are the master recordings from Sony Music Entertainment, the video archive of World Wrestling Entertainment, and 50,000 tapes of a certain Major League Baseball team from New York.
We can't be sure which one, because Iron Mountain, Inc. — a $5 billion storage and information-management company that operates a facility inside the former mine — does not readily release the names of its clients.
In the interest of protecting its clients and their valuable archives, Iron Mountain rarely allows visitors on the premises, though a 2013 feature in The New Yorker unmasked the usually secretive information-storage giant and revealed some names on its client list.
Photographer Nicholas Mehedin was also lucky enough to get access inside the underground Rosendale location, which is one of about 1,000 that Iron Mountain owns.
"I had to go through a lot of red tape and explain my interest and intentions to several people," Mehedin told Business Insider of the process.
We spoke with Mehedin, as well as the Rosendale location's district manager, Randy Crego, to get an idea of what it's like inside the old mine that houses both the mundane and the more unexpected archives from various Fortune 1000 companies.
SEE ALSO: How residents of a tiny West Virginia community live without any kind of modern technology
Today, a majority of the items stored are in the form of paper documents or tapes. In the '70s and '80s, however, the space hosted more interesting valuables, including musical instruments, antiques, and celebrity memorabilia. An art collector even stored many of her paintings here. At the same time, executives from some major companies — Exxon and Shell, for example — built sometimes-elaborate fallout shelters in the mine, where they would stay in the event a nuclear war broke out.
Source: The New Yorker
Currently, more than 94% of Fortune 1000 companies rely on Iron Mountain's more than 1,000 facilities to store and manage their information. But unlike data stored in the cloud, that information can come in any form — from paper printouts of meeting minutes, presentation slides, and invoices, to audio and video tapes.
While many of Iron Mountain's storage facilities are above ground inside "warehouses, hangars, and nondescript office buildings," according to The New Yorker, they do have a handful of units in previously active iron or limestone mines.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
