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Radio Row
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Radio Row (1921-1966) was a warehouse district in lower Manhattan, New York City. Radio Row was born in 1921 with the opening of City Radio on Cortlandt Street and died in 1966 when it was torn down to make room for the World Trade Center.[1] It held several blocks of electronic stores, which spread out both ways from a central axis along Cortlandt Street. The used radios, war surplus electronics (e.g. ARC-5 radios), junk and parts was piled so high that it would spill out onto the street. It was a scrounger's paradise. According to a business writer, it was also the origin of the electronic component distribution business.[2]
The New York Times made an early reference to "Radio Row" in 1927, when Cortlandt Street celebrated a "Radio Jubilee." The Times reported that "Today... Cortlandt Street is 'Radio Row,' while Broadway is just a thoroughfare." The street was closed and decorated with flags and bunting, and the Times reported plans for New York's acting mayor Joseph V. McKee to present a "key to Cortland Street" to the then-reigning Miss New York, Frieda Louise Mierse, while a contest was held to name a "Miss Downtown Radio."[3]
Meyer Berger recalled that, as a child, "On Saturday mornings, I used to venture from Brooklyn with my father to Radio Row on Cortlandt Street in Lower Manhattan, where he and hundreds of other New York men moved from stall to stall in search of the elusive tube that would make the radio work again. Later, my brothers went there with him in search of television components. Radio Row was a piece of all our interior maps."[4]
In 1930, the Times described Radio Row as located on on Greenwich Street "where Cortlandt Street intersects it and the Ninth Avenue Elevated forms a canopy over the roadway.... The largest concentration is in the block bounded by Day Street on the north and Cortlandt on the south, but Radio Row does not stop there; it overflows around the corner, around several corners, embracing in all some five crowded blocks." It estimates forty or fifty stores in the vicinity, "all going full blast at the same time. There may be regulations prohibiting this vociferous practice, but if the radio dealers have anything to say it about it, it will never have the slightest effect along Radio Row.... The clamor is heard even as one walks through the subway tunnel to the street exit.... The first impression, and in fact the only one, is auditory, a reverberating bedlam, a confusion of sounds which only an army of loudspeakers could produce." It notes, in addition to merchants selling radio sets, "others display mostly accessories... one shopkeeper last week featured a crystal set small enough to fit into a the pocket, and another gave prominent position to a bucket of condensers about an inch in side."[5]
World War II was unkind to Radio Row, and in 1944 the Times lamented that the "one-time repository of nearly everything from a tube socket to a complete radio station" was "bargainless and practically setless, too, due to wartime scarcities" but that it still catered to "tinkerers and engineers" and that "old spirit" and "magical quality" was still there. One shop said it was practically able to stay in business just by "making repairs on the electric meters burned out by the students of the city schools who were studying radio," and all were optimistic about growing public interest in "two new kinds of radio: FM and television."[6] Radio Row rebounded.
Its destruction in 1966 was highly controversial. A 1962 WCBS Radio commentator opined:
- Shaping up in New York City is a legal battle of overriding importance. Its outcome will conceivably affect us all. If the considerable power of the Port Authority is allowed to dispossess the merchants of Radio Row, then, it is our conviction, no home or business is safe from the caprice of government."[7]
When it was demolished, some of the junkier stock was simply carted away along with the debris from the demolished buildings.
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In 1923, the Boston Globe reported that a section of the North End had been dubbed "Radio Row" because of the large number of radio antennas being installed in that neighborhood. "The hurdy-gurdy has a rival," wrote the Globe, and "No skyline anywhere else in the city or the suburbs is filled with so many antennae[sic] as the blocks stretching along some sections of Hanover and Salem sts. Many residents have three or four aerials—one has six—with wires leading down to receiving sets of all descriptions, in the homes of the foreign-born residents. It has all come about in a few months.... All stairways lead to the roof, where [some residents] are arranging to rig up a loudspeaker, connected with instruments below. A survey of housetops... shows a whole population getting ready."[8]
Radio Row is also a term for the building used during Super Bowl week. This building houses national and local radio shows broadcasting from the Super Bowl city.
- ^ 'Radio Row:' The neighborhood before the World Trade Center. National Public Radio (2002-06-03). Retrieved on 2009-10-01.
- ^ Hartman, Amir (2004). Ruthless Execution: What Business Leaders Do When Their Companies Hit the Wall. Financial Times Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-101884-1. , p. 167 "The electronic component distribution business started in the 1920s and 1930s, selling radio tubes on lower Manhattan's Cortland[sic] St...."
- ^ "'Radio Row' Begins Its Jubilee Today," The New York Times, September 6, 1927, p. 34
- ^ Berger, Meyer (2004). Meyer Berger's New York. Fordham University Press. ISBN 0-8232-2328-0. p. 11
- ^ "Bedlam on Radio Row: Downtown Mart Continues its Musical Pandemonium, But Meantime Sells Cameras and Golf Balls." The New York Times, May 25, 1930, p. 144
- ^ Kennedy, T. R., Jr., "Cortlandt Street," The New York Times, November 19, 1944, p. X7
- ^ Sam Slate, WCBS Radio, October 4, 1962, as quoted in Glanz, James; Eric Lipton (2003). City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center. Times Books. ISBN 0-8050-7428-7. p. 62
- ^ Cullinan, Howell (1923), The Boston Globe, May 6, 1923, p. A5.
- Program on NPR about radio row
- Vintage postcard showing Radio Row
