• My Account
  • Your Profile
  • Member Archives
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Cart / $0.00

No products in the cart.

Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links
No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

No products in the cart.

No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
No Result
View All Result

Site of the Week 9/5/2014: SBS, New York

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
September 5, 2014
in Free Content, New Jersey, New York, Tower Site of the Week
0
The SBS building
The SBS building

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

Over the years, our travels to New York City have taken us inside the studios of nearly all the city’s stations, sometimes at multiple locations as the city’s broadcast center of gravity has shifted inexorably from midtown Manhattan down to the island’s lower tip.

But even as CBS and Clear Channel consolidated their clusters from scattered Midtown locations into new combined facilities south of Canal Street, a few broadcasters hung on in Midtown, albeit not for the most part in English.

Univision’s stations have long occupied space in the former CBS building at 485 Madison Avenue. ESPN’s WEPN-FM (98.7), as we’ll see in an upcoming installment, recently moved out of the Cumulus (WABC/WPLJ/WNSH) facility at 2 Penn Plaza and into a new home next door to ABC Radio News at 125 West End Avenue, up in the mid-60s. Bloomberg’s WBBR (1130) is part of that company’s overall operation at 731 Lexington Avenue.

And then there’s Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS), which has made its home for almost a quarter of a century now in one of the more unusual spaces ever occupied by a New York City radio station.

This is 26 W. 56th Street, tucked between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and if it looks more like an upscale townhouse than a radio station, that’s because it is – or at least once was – an upscale townhouse.

Front door at the SBS townhouse
Front door at the SBS townhouse

SBS Rack Room
SBS Rack Room

I’ll let the nice folks at the West 54-55 Street Block Association pick up the story for a bit here: “Remodeled in 1907-08 by the noted architect Harry Allan Jacobs for investment banker Isaac Seligman and long occupied by banker E. Hayward Ferry and his wife Amelia Parsons Ferry, this highly intact former townhouse is an exceptionally fine example of the restrained Neo-French Classic variant of the Beaux Arts style and forms part of “Bankers’ Row,” a group of five residences built for bankers on West 56th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It was originally constructed in 1871 by the well-known New York architects D. & J. Jardine. Jacobs extended the house at the front and rear and relocated the entrance to the ground story. He created a new limestone façade and copper roof.”

Fifth floor hallway
Fifth floor hallway

A WSKQ studio
A WSKQ studio

The Ferrys lived here from 1908 until 1935, and I don’t know much about what happened in the 55 years that followed at this address. But I do know that around 1990, SBS moved its original New York station, WSKQ (620 Newark), and its newer sister station, WSKQ-FM (97.9 New York) from 1500 Broadway over here to this address, renovating the five-story mansion to become a narrow but fully functional broadcast facility.

Prod room at SBS
Prod room at SBS

Prod room at SBS
Prod room at SBS

The SBS station lineup changed a few years later: in 1996, SBS bought WPAT-FM (93.1 Paterson) and sold off the former WSKQ(AM), which had by then become WXLX with regional Mexican programming. The rooms you see above, toward the front of the building on the fourth and fifth floors, are production rooms now, but I believe they were the original studios for WSKQ AM and FM, updated somewhat over the years.

WPAT-FM main studio
WPAT-FM main studio

WSKQ main studio
WSKQ main studio

The main studios for each of the FMs in the building are now toward the rear of each studio floor, and they’re nice big spaces for making radio. Downstairs, the lower floors are now sales and management office areas, as well as an engineering rack room at the front of the building. It’s a tight squeeze, but a great location – and SBS is, we believe, the only major New York commercial broadcaster that gets to say it owns its studio real estate instead of paying rent.

Empire lobby
Empire lobby

SBS transmitter room
SBS transmitter room

This trip in 2013 not only took us inside the SBS studio building for the first time – it also took us inside the SBS transmitter room for the first time. (And we finally got a decent picture of that magnificent ASR plaque in the Empire State Building lobby, too!)

WSKQ 97.9
WSKQ 97.9

WPAT-FM 93.1
WPAT-FM 93.1

SBS inherited transmitter space from its predecessors on each FM frequency: WSKQ-FM was the old WEVD-FM, occupying one of the small transmitter rooms in the “mid-80s” on the Empire State Building. (I believe it was the 81st floor, but I may be getting it mixed up with WBAI.)

WPAT-FM, meanwhile, had migrated over the years from its original New Jersey home up to the Chrysler Building and then to 1 World Trade Center, where it was one of the four FMs (along with WKCR 89.9, WNYC-FM 93.9 and WKTU 103.5) that lost transmitters on that sad September morning 13 years ago.

In the aftermath, Empire management cleared out much of the 78th and 79th floors, replacing offices with transmitter rooms to accommodate the broadcasters who suddenly needed room there. That included SBS, which quickly obtained an STA to put 93.1 back on the air from Empire, and which eventually built out a nice new room on the 79th floor with room for both of its FM stations. (In the interim, until this room was finished in 2003, SBS operated WPAT from its backup facilities over at 4 Times Square, where it still maintains auxiliary transmitters for both stations.)

SBS HD transmitters
SBS HD transmitters

A view south to 1WTC
A view south to 1WTC

This nice layout features a mirror-image pair of paired BE transmitters, WSKQ on the left and WPAT on the right, with newer BE HD transmitters tucked in behind each set of analog rigs.

Because of spacing issues to WHYN-FM in Springfield, Massachusetts, among others, WPAT-FM hasn’t been able to be licensed at Empire at full power; its license still lists the World Trade Center and every six months it continues to apply for and receive an STA to operate from Empire at reduced power.

Our 2013 visit to Empire was the first in which the topped-off 1 World Trade Center could be seen off in the distance to the south. Will it once again have FM up there someday soon?

Thanks to SBS’ Tony Peiffer for the tour!

SPRING IS HERE…

And if you don’t have your Tower Site Calendar, now’s the time!

If you’ve been waiting for the price to come down, it’s now 30 percent off!

This year’s cover is a beauty — the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. Both the towers and the landscape are gorgeous.

And did you see? Tower Site of the Week is back, featuring this VOA site as it faces an uncertain future. 

Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (buy the calendar to find out which ones!).

We still have a few of our own calendars left – as well as a handful of Radio Historian Calendars – and we are still shipping regularly.

The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025, too. Why not order both?) 

Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the new calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too! 

 


And don’t miss a big batch of New York IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Next week: More NYC studios, 2013

Share this:

  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
Tags: Empire State BuildingSBSWPAT-FMWSKQ
Previous Post

NERW Update: Buffalo Gets Mix-ed

Next Post

NERW 9/8/2014: Veteran Morning Host Shifts Stations

Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

Editor/Publisher, NorthEast Radio Watch and Tower Site of the Week

Related Posts

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/19/2025: WRGB’s Bishop Retires
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/19/2025: WRGB’s Bishop Retires

In this week’s issue… WRGB's Bishop to retire - CT "tower" coming down - Remembering Robin Marshall

by Scott Fybush
May 19, 2025
Top of the Tower Podcast #062: Keeping Students in Broadcasting
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #062: Keeping Students in Broadcasting

In this week's episode - It was a longer hiatus than we intended, but Top of the Tower is back with a new spring season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio. This week, we continue bringing...

by Scott Fybush
May 14, 2025
NERW 12/15/2014: CRTC Drains Niagara Simulcast
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/12/2025: New Owners For Two AMs

In this week’s issue… Catsimatidis, Shula add signals - Radiodays rocks Toronto - Ex-Bell, Evanov stations rebrand By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT - MA - RI - CT - NY - NJ - PA -...

by Scott Fybush
May 13, 2025
Top of the Tower Podcast #061: Rob Bertrand at NAB/PREC 2025
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #061: Rob Bertrand at NAB/PREC 2025

Top of the Tower talks with Inrush Broadcast's Rob Bertrand about the future of broadcast engineering as a service

by Scott Fybush
May 6, 2025
Next Post
NERW 9/8/2014: Veteran Morning Host Shifts Stations

NERW 9/8/2014: Veteran Morning Host Shifts Stations

Log In

Join Now | Lost Password?

Get Fybush.com Updates

Get Fybush.com updates emailed directly to your inbox!

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.