Over the past quarter-century, my NorthEast Radio Watch column has frequently revisited the state of New York City’s FM and TV infrastructure as it’s recovered from the destruction of the World Trade Center.
One year after 9/11, I took a deep dive into what happened in the hours and days immediately after the attack, as broadcasters scrambled to find temporary sites, reactivate long-dormant backup facilities and call in favors from transmitter and antenna manufacturers to divert equipment to get television and FM signals back on the air for a city desperate for information.
Progress moved slowly for quite a while. In 2016, I revisited the state of the market’s infrastructure at a time when things still looked uncertain. Even after the new One World Trade Center had been topped off with a pair of master UHF TV antennas, broadcasters weren’t in a hurry at first to install their transmitters and go live from the new highest point in the city.
Another decade later, the situation has changed dramatically. The last of the stations operating under special temporary authority have finally been licensed, the new ATSC 3.0 transmission system has hit the air for TV following a repack of UHF channel, and many broadcasters have reinforced their auxiliary facilities after learning the disaster recovery lessons of 9/11.
Here’s what things look like on the anniversary in 2026.
Radio
One thing we didn’t fully anticipate ten years ago was how committed New York’s FM stations ended up remaining to their legacy site at the Empire State Building. By 2016, the FM stations that had lost their World Trade Center sites had all built out permanent facilities for themselves at Empire. iHeart’s WKTU (103.5) was the easiest, since it already had a working auxiliary facility at Empire that took over seamlessly when the Trade Center was lost.
Public radio WNYC (93.9) also made a fairly swift move to Empire in the months after 9/11, but FCC rules hampered its ability to become fully licensed there until WNYC negotiated a short-spacing agreement with Connecticut’s WZMX (93.7). That left only WPAT-FM (93.1), even more tightly spaced against WHYN-FM (93.1) up in Springfield, Massachusetts. It wasn’t until March 2023, more than 21 years after losing its licensed site at the World Trade Center, that WPAT-FM negotiated a deal that allowed it to at long last become fully licensed again at Empire.
By that point, all the FMs at Empire had also upgraded their backup capabilities. The 1967-vintage Alford master antenna had been a major technological breakthrough in its day, but after half a century its 32 bays were obstructing a planned expansion of the windows on the 102nd floor observation gallery and it gave off too much radiation to be used while there were visitors on that floor.
Not long after our “9/11 Plus 15” installment in 2016, engineers built a “cocoon” around the mast just above the 102nd floor and installed a new FM master auxiliary antenna underneath, capable of serving all 19 FM stations that were then at Empire. (One of the legacy Empire signals, Pacifica’s WBAI 99.5, gave up its space there soon afterward, after being unable to pay rent.)
That aux antenna has allowed lots of work to be done more easily on the rest of the mast, as we’ll see soon when we look at what’s happened with TV.
But before we switch dials, it’s worth noting that aside from one FM translator aimed south at Brooklyn, no other FM signals have found it worthwhile to think about moving to the new World Trade Center. That’s partially because the Trade Center is so far south that an FM signal there would be significantly less useful in the Bronx and beyond into Westchester and Connecticut, but also because it’s so tall that a full class B signal there would be derated even more than the 6000 watts that Empire class Bs use.
At the same time, those Empire FMs will still face some decisions in coming years. The master antenna that replaced the Alford for most of them is now 37 years old, likely nearing the end of its lifespan. There’s another problem, too: the explosion of super-tall towers in midtown Manhattan is increasingly blocking the line of sight from Empire, which is no longer even the tallest perch in midtown, never mind on the entire island.
There’s another lesson learned from 9/11: even with the new master aux antenna that’s alleviated the need for all the full overnight shutdowns that were once common at Empire, disaster recovery planning remains vitally important, and that’s why most of those major FMs also have auxiliary sites away from Empire, some nearby at Four Times Square, some over in New Jersey.
MEANWHILE ON TV
It didn’t take long after our “9/11 Plus 15” column for the pace of TV buildouts to accelerate at the new One World Trade Center.
Under the direction of John Lyons, who oversaw the buildout of the new TV facility there for the Durst Organization, the open half-floor at the top of 1WTC set aside for TV broadcasters filled up quickly through 2017 and 2018.
Not every broadcaster decided it was worth it to move back downtown and use the highest antenna in town; while NBC/Telemundo, CBS, Fox, public TV’s WNET/WLIW and Ion’s WPXN made the move to 1 WTC, ABC, Tribune’s WPIX and Univision’s WXTV/WFUT chose to stay put at Empire.
Whether it was a question of a favorable rent deal or a pragmatic conclusion that there were few enough over-the-air viewers (especially on VHF channels) to worry about a somewhat less robust signal from Empire, the New York TV dial ended up split between stations at 1 WTC and Empire. (And in fairness, it had always been somewhat that way – even after most TV stations went to the original Trade Center in the early 1970s, WXTV and several others chose to stay put at Empire back then.)
One more full-power station eventually joined the ranks downtown: WJLP-TV, on RF channel 3, moved from Nevada to “New Jersey” with an antenna at 4 Times Square before upgrading to a custom low-VHF panel antenna at 1 WTC to carry MeTV programming from its new owner, Weigel Broadcasting.
The new facility at 1 WTC was and is designed radically differently from Empire. At Empire, every station has its own transmitter room, spread out from floors 78 up to 85, a relic of the days when transmitters were huge and constantly supervised by engineers. With modern solid-state, liquid-cooled transmitters, the room at Empire (shown above during a 2017 SBE/AES chapter meeting led by Lyons) could be built more like a data center, with each station’s transmitter laid out in the open next to equipment racks, all feeding combiners on the other side of the room. Each station’s engineers only show up here occasionally to make sure everything remains clean, cool and happy, which also means that if anything were to happen up here (as unlikely as that is given the heavy security and reinforced building construction), it’s very unlikely there would be six engineers on duty the way there were at the old Trade Center on 9/11.
The new room is also quiet enough that it’s possible for all of those stations to be on the air and the room is still quiet enough for an SBE meeting. The only exception to the liquid-cooled transmitters from Rohde & Schwarz is the WCBS-TV transmitter. It’s a traditional air-cooled unit from GatesAir, for a very good reason: because the company’s predecessor, Harris, supported WCBS’s old aux transmitter at Empire in the hours and days after 9/11, the station stayed on the air and WCBS vowed permanent loyalty to the company.
The signals being transmitted up here have changed somewhat, too: the new ATSC 3.0 advanced TV broadcast standard was slow to come to New York, but when it finally arrived, WLIW used its UHF channel here to provide ATSC 3.0 service for PBS, CBS, NBC and Telemundo. (Up at Empire, WPIX’s VHF signal is serving the same purpose for itself, WABC and Univision’s WXTV).
Regardless of which site stations are using for their primary antennas, most of them have learned an important post-9/11 lesson: they maintain auxiliary signals at a variety of backup sites ranging from 4 Times Square to the historic Alpine Tower in New Jersey in order to make sure they’re never again caught by the loss of their sole transmission site.
The Future
This anniversary is likely the last time we’ll revisit this story in so much detail. An entire generation of technology and engineers have now passed through New York radio and TV since that awful morning. It took more than 15 years, but all of the disruption caused that day has finally been restored to a new form of normalcy.
Today’s facilities, both radio and TV, are able to function with far less human attention and in much less space than they required back in 2001. That’s already been factored in to the design of 1WTC, but as Empire approaches its remarkable centennial of broadcast service in a few years, it’s likely that more standalone FM and TV rooms may be consolidated to free up space for other uses. There are also still leftover antennas on the Empire mast that could be removed; we all saw one of them in unusual detail a few months ago when those daredevil climbers made a very dangerous and very illegal ascent of the mast and showed off for the world atop the highest antenna there, the long obsolete analog channel 4/5 antenna that was only used by WNBC and WNYW for a few years until everything went digital in 2009.
As we’ve done every year at this time since 9/11, we remember the six broadcast engineers who lost their lives that day.
Isais Rivera and Bob Pattison of WCBS-TV, Bill Steckman of WNBC, Don DiFranco of WABC-TV, Steve Jacobson of WPIX and Rod Coppola of WNET will never be forgotten – and to their names, we add dear friend John Lyons, who was so instrumental in the rebuilding of New York’s FM and TV transmission sites through the upgrade of 4 Times Square and the buildout of 1WTC. John died far too young in 2019, just as his work there was nearing completion, including his careful forethought to have the TV combiners designed to enable a swift and simple rearrangement for the TV repack that took place just a few months before his death.
(We also thank Mike Fitzpatrick of NECRAT.us for the use of his detailed images of 1 WTC. His New York City pages contain intricate detail of the antennas on Empire and 1 WTC and are well worth a visit.)
