When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in collections arranged to produce signals favoring some directions over others. These were landmarks out on the edges of town, or standing oddly on salt bogs or farmland.
From my bedroom in New Jersey, not far across the Hudson from New York City, I could see the red lights on the tops of towers standing in the “Meadowlands” (we called them swamps then) with Manhattan’s skyline beyond.
The towers in the photo above are three of those, tasked with beaming WMCA/570 and WNYC/820 toward New York’s boroughs from a pond of impounded water beside the Hackensack River and the east spur of the New Jersey Turnpike. Built in 1940, these three towers have by now become the most-seen AM radio signal source on Earth. For a while, they were also the most heard. That’s because, in its prime, which ran from 1958 to 1966, WMCA was also the leading top 40 music station in the world’s leading radio market. (WABC, with a signal ten times as strong, ruled the suburbs, with a night signal heard across half the country.)
While these days WNYC is the AM side of New York’s public radio empire (which brings in more money, largely from listeners, than any of the commercial stations in town), it is most famous for Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s “Talk to the People” show, which ran in the first half of the 1940s. (Back then WNYC had its own towers standing on what’s now WNYC Transmitter Park, alongside the East River in Brooklyn.)
Prior to the Internet, major media comprised a fewness of sources, in both print and broadcast. That fewness is over now (there are over 4 million podcasts alone). Because the writing is on the wall for broadcasting, I’ve shared thousands of photos of transmitters and antennas, knowing that the land under the most vulnerable ones—those on the AM band—tends to be worth more than the signals themselves. Many of these sites have already been sold off, with signals moving to shared towers on other stations’ sites (e.g. KHJ/930 and KABC/790 in Los Angeles, WSCR/670 and WBBM/780 in Chicago) or just going dark (e.g. KSFO’s transmitter on 560 AM in San Francisco).
Radio is also slowly being eaten alive on the talk side by podcasts and on the music side by streaming. So I publish those photos as historical evidence of what in a few years (decades at most) will be no more. (Sorry, but no amount of lawmaking or regulation will save AM radio. Much as many of us—me included—still love it, neither the tech nor the economics can compete with the Internet, smartphones, the cellular system, and computers.)
So I recently tested a theory: that it is good to have a conversation about all these developments, at least among active and retired professionals in the shrinking world of broadcast engineering. You can read about that on my Trunkline blog.
Given that radio’s content (as we now call it) is gone at the speed of short-term memory (unless it’s recorded, which mostly it isn’t), the kind of reporting I’m doing here may be the only history radio has—even though this post will also likely disappear into The Great Uncoformity into which all of digital history will fall like snow into a giant melt that will leave only the ruins of abandoned data centers.
The top photo is one of many I’ve shot on en route to EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport). By the way, these towers were built when one could walk on the land there. One needed boots and a scythe, but it was possible. The water was impounded in the 1990s, I think. Here are some shots from a visit to the site nine years ago.
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