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October 9-16, 2003
Roxborough Tower Farm, Philadelphia PA (part
II)
In
last
week's edition
, we began exploring one of the most fascinating
tower clusters in America, the thirteen towers and 38 stations
that call the tower farm at Roxborough, on the western edge of
Philadelphia, home.
This week, we finish off our visit to Roxborough by looking
at the stations that occupy the five tall towers on the eastern
side of the cluster, lined up along Domino Lane and nearby Paoli
Avenue.
WCAU-TV:
The first station to sign on from Domino Lane
was the
Philadelphia Bulletin
's CBS affiliate, WCAU-TV
10, which had signed on in 1948 from the top of the PSFS Building
in Center City. Since Philadelphia is not a city of skyscrapers
(there was a longstanding agreement that no building would rise
above the statue of William Penn on City Hall, though it's since
been breached), that tower site was fine for covering Philly,
but it was insufficient to compete with WFIL-TV and KYW-TV when
they moved from shorter towers (at Roxborough and Wyndmoor, respectively)
to their shared tall tower at Roxborough in the mid-fifties.
So WCAU-TV broke ground on the east side of Domino Lane for
a 1200-foot Dresser-Crane tower, which carried channel 10 and
WCAU-FM 98.1 to a wide new audience as far away as the Lehigh
Valley, northern Delaware and the Jersey shore. The
Bulletin
sold
the WCAU stations to CBS in 1958 but kept the Muzak franchise,
which was soon moved to a new
Bulletin
-owned FM station,
WPBS (Philadelphia Bulletin Station) on 98.9, still operating
from the channel 10 tower and a new studio/transmitter building
at 440 Domino Lane. The building is still in use to this day,
as the studios for 98.9 (now WUSL) and its Clear Channel sister
station WJJZ (106.1), which doesn't even transmit from Roxborough
- it's at the old WPTZ site in Wyndmoor!
When
we first visited Roxborough in 1995, WCAU's status quo had held
for nearly forty years - it was owned by CBS and operated its
FM and TV signals from the 1950s Dresser-Crane tower and the
original brick transmitter building shown at left.
But later that year, CBS merged its TV station operations
with Westinghouse (which would then go on to acquire CBS), forcing
a decision to be made. Since Westinghouse and CBS both owned
TV stations in Philadelphia, one would have to go - and the choice
was to keep Westinghouse's KYW-TV, flip it from NBC to CBS, and
sell off CBS' WCAU-TV. The natural buyer was NBC itself, which
traded its Denver and Salt Lake City stations and its superior
TV signal in Miami (CBS was then on the rimshot channel 6 signal,
which had to operate from far south of Miami because of spacing
restrictions to Orlando's channel 6 and West Palm Beach's channel
5; it ended up with NBC's channel 4 and forced NBC to channel
6) for WCAU-TV, which promptly became "NBC 10," though
still with CBS' FM facility on 98.1 (by then it was oldies WOGL)
and WUSL on 98.9 on the tower as well.
The
tower site apparently didn't go along with the station, and ended
up in the hands of American Tower, which had bigger plans for
310 Domino Lane.
Seeing the advent of DTV on the horizon, and knowing that
space would be needed for all those new signals, American Tower
put up a new 1256-foot candelabra tower next to the old WCAU
tower in 2002. There's a four-bay ERI master antenna system and
combiner there for FM tenants, though WOGL is the only one at
the moment. (WUSL has a CP to relocate to the WIOQ site, the
original 1947 channel 6 tower, even though its studios are right
here on Domino.)
On the TV side, the new tower is home (naturally) to WCAU-TV
10 and WCAU-DT 67, as well as to Univision's WUVP (Channel 65,
a recent move-in from New Jersey and still licensed to Vineland
NJ) and WUVP-DT 66; Tribune's WPHL-DT 54, Viacom's WPSG-DT 32
(we'll see where their respective analog sites are in a moment),
Pax's WPPX-DT 31 (licensed to Wilmington, Delaware, with its
analog channel 61 site over in New Jersey) and independent public
broadcaster WYBE (Channel 35) and WYBE-DT 34.
At some point in the not too distant future, American Tower
apparently plans to take down the top few hundred feet of the
old WCAU tower, which will then be relegated to auxiliary duty.
Fox Tower:
Just south of the WCAU site, at 340 Domino
Lane, is an 1184-foot structure known locally as the "Fox
Tower." The uninitiated may think this has something to
do with the fact that it's owned by Fox Television Stations and
is home to Fox O&O WTXF (Channel 29) - and they'd be wrong,
believe it or not. In fact, this tower is named for William,
Irwin and Benjamin Fox, named for the two brothers and their
father who owned WIBF (103.9) in the Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown
and, in the early sixties, secured a construction permit for
WIBF-TV 29, which went on the air in 1965 from this very spot.
WIBF-FM, which broadcast from a tower and studios at the Fox
family's "Benson East" building (named for William
and Irwin, Ben's sons...get it?), moved here in the seventies,
running a whopping 180 watts ERP, later increased to 340 watts
ERP, from nearly a thousand feet up on the tower.
The Fox family sold channel 29 to Taft Broadcasting after
a few years, and it soon became WTAF-TV, a prominent independent
station; with the coming of the Fox television network in the
mid-80s, it became a Fox O&O as WTXF, leaving the old building
on Domino Lane behind in favor of a bigger new building slightly
up the hill closer to the tower.
The old channel 29 space became home to WYBE (Channel 35)
when it launched in 1990, then became vacant again a year ago
when WYBE moved up the street to the WCAU-DT tower. (Channel
35 was the original home of public broadcaster WHYY in the late
fifties, but when Wilmington's channel 12 became available in
1963, WHYY moved there, keeping channel 35 as secondary service
WUHY until shutting it down sometime in the early eighties.)
That
leaves one tenant in the old 29 building, in the last little
corner that still has electrical service: the 103.9 facility
that started out as WIBF.
The Foxes kept WIBF going as a leased-time ethnic station
well into the nineties, but finally sold out to Jarad Broadcasting,
which flipped the station to modern rock as a simulcast of its
WDRE on Long Island, eventually moving the WDRE calls to Jenkintown
when Long Island reclaimed the old WLIR calls.
Later on, Jarad sold out to Radio One, which flipped 103.9
to urban as WPHI, its current calls and format.
And note something interesting here: WPHI, a class A facility
on 103.9, is located just a few hundred feet from WSNI, a class
B facility on 104.5, just 600 kHz away. How can this be? Simple
- both stations existed before 1964 and get to operate under
less restrictive spacing rules. Check out that filter there -
it's designed to keep WSNI's signal out of WPHI's antenna, and
it works just fine. (Yet the FCC just spent a lot of money on
a study designed to see whether or not 100-watt LPFM facilities
600 kHz from full-power FMs can cause interference...)
One more note about WPHI's unusual allocations situation:
it's 10.6 MHz away from WMMR (93.3), the other major Philly FM
that's not at Roxborough, and as a result the WPHI license includes
a line noting that WPHI is required to lower power to 270 watts
ERP if there's IF interference with WMMR.
Banks Tower:
Across
the street from the WCAU and Fox sites sits another tower that's
a relic of the early days of UHF in Philadelphia.
Channel 17 was actually the first UHF operation in Philadelphia,
licensed to Camden, N.J. and signing on in 1960 under the ownership
of Percy B. Crawford's Young People's Church of the air as WPCA.
With 12 kw of visual power at 580 feet from a site somewhere
in Center City, one might imagine that there were few viewers,
and indeed, WPCA signed off within a couple of years. In 1964,
its license was sold to the Philadelphia Broadcasting Company,
owned by Aaron Katz and Leonard Stevens, for just over $200,000.
Renamed WPHL, channel 17 signed back on in the fall of 1965
from the old WPTZ/WRCV channel 3 site in Wyndmoor, but before
long moved to a 1095-foot tower at 329 Domino Lane, between the
WFIL-TV/KYW-TV property we chronicled last week and the west
side of Domino.
Channel 17 changed hands, but not calls, several more times
in the years that followed, including a stint as an owned-and-operated
part of the very short-lived Overmyer Network, and was eventually
sold to Tribune in 1992 for $19 million, a far cry from the $200,000
Katz and Stevens paid for it way back when. Today it's a WB affiliate,
still operating from the "Banks Tower."
(Why not the "Katz Tower" or the "Stevens Tower"?
This takes a bit of explaining - it seems that Stevens was related
to William and Dolly Banks, owners of WHAT 1340 and WHAT-FM 96.5,
and the Bankses ended up as part-owners of WPHL before the sale
to Overmyer. William and Dolly Banks would eventually lend their
initials to their FM station, which became WWDB and was located
on this tower for a while. In any case, the name stuck, and even
though this, too, is now an American Tower site, it's universally
known as the Banks tower.)
The tower soon acquired more tenants: WHYY moved channel 12
here soon after the tower went up, and eventually its sister
FM operation, WUHY 90.9, later WHYY-FM, joined it on the Banks
tower.
More FMs moved in here as well: in the seventies, Len Stevens
(still engineering for WPHL after the station was sold) installed
one of the first master FM systems in the country, with a two-layer
ERI cogwheel antenna and a three-port combiner that became home
to WDVR (101.1), WMGK (102.9) and WRCP-FM (104.5). 101.1 and
102.9 left eventually (we'll see where they went in a moment),
but new tenants arrived: WYSP (94.1), relocating from the old
channel 6 tower (and before that, the side of one of the WIBG
990 sticks down Ridge Pike a few miles - 94.1 began as WIBG-FM,
after all), and WDAS-FM (105.3), relocating from one of the WDAS
1480 towers across the Schuylkill River on Edgely Road.
Today, Banks is home to WHYY, WYSP, WMGK and WDAS-FM, as well
as a licensed aux site for WMWX (95.7) and 101.1, now WBEB.
Gross
Tower:
We'll finish up our Roxborough visit with the last
of the UHF towers to go up here - the 1158-foot tower at 216
Paoli Avenue, just north of Umbria, built in 1979 by William
S. Gross for his new channel 57, WWSG(TV), a subscription TV
operation. (In later years, channel 57 would be sold to independent
TV entrepreneur Milt Grant, who renamed it WGBS-TV, then to the
Paramount Stations Group, which renamed it WPSG and made it a
UPN affiliate, which it remains to this day.)
The Gross tower quickly attracted FM tenants: 101.1, by then
WEAZ (and now WBEB) moved over from the Banks tower, as did WWDB
(96.5, now WPTP) and WMGK (102.9).
WXTU (92.5) moved into Roxborough in the early eighties from
its former site in Norristown, on Potshop Road not far from the
WTEL (860) towers. WMWX (95.7), the first FM in Roxborough back
in its WFLN days, relocated to the Gross tower in 1999 from its
old home at 8200 Ridge Pike; once there, it rejoined Temple University's
WRTI (90.1), which also moved to Gross from the old WFLN tower.
And so to recap: you see above, in a 2001 view from the top
of the PSFS building in Center City, one of the most important
sites in America. From left to right, if I'm reading the image
correctly:
- WPVI/KYW Tower:
WPVI (6), KYW-TV (3)
- WGTW Tower:
WGTW (48), WXPN (88.5), and now WPLY (100.3)
- 1947 WFIL-TV Tower:
WIOQ (102.1), WUSL (98.9 CP)
- Gross Tower:
WPSG (57), WRTI (90.1), WXTU (92.5),
WMWX (95.7), WPTP (96.5), WBEB (101.1), WMGK (102.9)
- Banks Tower:
WHYY-TV (12), WPHL (17), WHYY-DT (55),
WYSP (94.1), WSNI (104.5), WDAS-FM (105.3)
- Fox Tower:
WTXF (29), WYBE (35, since moved), WPHI
(103.9)
- WCAU Tower:
WCAU-TV (10), WOGL (98.1), WUSL (98.9)
Since this photo was taken, two new towers have gone up:
- WPVI-DT/KYW-DT Tower:
WPVI-DT (64), KYW-DT (26)
- WCAU-DT Tower:
WCAU-TV (10), WCAU-DT (67), WPPX-DT
(31), WPSG-DT (32), WYBE-DT (34), WYBE (35), WPHL-DT (54), WUVP
(65), WUVP-DT (66)
Guess I need to get back to the PSFS building again to reshoot,
huh?
(And in the meantime, the Sept. 24 issue of
Radio World
contains
an article of mine with more historical information and nifty
photos of Roxborough -
check
it out here
!)
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