Twitter operated out of a Boulder office on Walnut St. for years, mostly housing the employees of Gnip, a company that sold Twitter data to enterprise customers which Twitter had acquired.

The Walnut office consisted of the top two floors, 3 and 4.

Over time the office morphed from being "Gnip" to being a genuine Twitter office, with folks from all kinds of teams working out of the office including Timelines, DMs, Health, and Tweets. Most of the teams were geo-distributed.

It grew fast.

By early 2019 people started cramming extra folks into the desks ("desk buddies"). People who were often in meetings (product mostly) were asked to hotdesk.

To alleviate this, Twitter leased the basement of the building, as floors 1 and 2 were leased to other companies. Construction on the basement location was pretty secretive, with the REW (Real Estate and Workplace) team wanting to unveil the new space in a grand opening when complete.

August 2019 the space opened and... everyone hated it.

Since it was in a basement, there were no windows. The entire area felt like some kind of Twitter-themed tomb with big glass walls or strange hanging "soundproof" panels separating work areas.

Nobody liked being down there because it was separated from the main common areas and all of the other employees. It felt isolated & lonely - coming into the office typically meant you wouldn't see anyone else from other floors except when you took the extremely slow elevator upstairs for lunch.