October 16, 2009

WTBS/WPCH-TV 17, Atlanta

Welcome to our new season of Tower Site of the Week - and the latest in a series of TSoTW installments showcasing the images you'll find in the brand-new Tower Site Calendar 2010, arriving any day now in a mailbox near you.

(It's more than just pretty pictures and dates - the modest sum we raise from each year's calendar helps make possible the travel needed to make this feature happen every week on the website...and we're grateful for all your support!)

This week's installment is a tower that might not be around much longer, now that it sits devoid of tenants, yet occupying some expensive real estate in a fast-growing city. And it's a tower with a long and truly fascinating history - as well as a place of honor on the exclusive list of the nation's tallest self-supporting lattice structures.

Welcome to 1018 West Peachtree Street, just north of downtown Atlanta, an address that first entered the annals of Atlanta broadcasting in 1949, when Storer Broadcasting put WAGA-TV (Channel 5) on the air here from a state-of-the-art studio building and a short tower out back.

WAGA's tenure at this location was relatively short - in 1955, it built a much taller tower at 1551 Briarcliff Road, on what were then the outskirts of town to the northwest, and in 1965, Storer left the studios at 1018 West Peachtree behind as well, moving to a new (but classically Storer Colonial-style) studio building at the Briarcliff site.

The studios didn't stay vacant for long, though: in 1967, Jack Rice, Jr. took over the building to house his new UHF independent station. The signal on channel 17 bore Rice's initials - WJRJ - but instead of the old WAGA tower, Rice built a massive new self-supporting tower, just over a thousand feet in height, to give Channel 17 as much signal punch as a UHF station could enjoy back in that era of low-sensitivity tuners and lousy antennas.

That tall tower was about the only thing WJRJ had going for it in those early years, which might explain why Rice was quick to sell Channel 17 in 1970, when the entrepreneurial son of a Georgia billboard owner came calling with the idea that it might be fun to own a television station.

The rest of the story, of course, is the stuff of legend: that billboard owner's son was one Robert E. Turner, better known as "Ted," and when he took over channel 17, changing the calls to WTCG ("Turner Communications Group"), he gave birth to the nation's first "Superstation", all emanating from that old WAGA building in front of the tall tower on West Peachtree.

In its early years, WTCG ran on a shoestring, at one point holding an on-air telethon just to raise enough money to keep the station on the air for a few more weeks. There were lots of old movies, a slapstick late-night newscast anchored by Bill Tush, Atlanta Braves games and a growing network of microwave relays carrying the signal all over the South. In 1976, WTCG's signal went up on the Satcom I satellite, becoming the first national superstation and sparking a rapid flurry of growth that included Turner's purchase of the Braves (to ensure a ready supply of programming), the addition of a UHF station in Charlotte, N.C. to the Turner empire, a call change in 1979 to WTBS ("Turner Broadcasting System"), calls obtained from the MIT radio station up in Cambridge, Massachusetts - and then, in 1980, the sale of the Charlotte station to fund the wild gamble on an all-news cable channel.

The launch of CNN led, slowly, to the demise of 1018 West Peachtree: with no room to build a new cable channel in the cramped quarters on Peachtree, Turner bought a failed country club called "Techwood" just to the west, across I-75/85, turning its clubhouse into the new CNN headquarters.

Over the next few decades, the old clubhouse sprouted a farm of satellite dishes out back, as well as numerous additions - and eventually it became the centerpiece of a campus full of buildings housing the many arms of Turner Broadcasting, though ironically not the network that inaugurated the facility. CNN moved out in 1987, taking up residence at the CNN Center building in downtown Atlanta and freeing up space for WTBS to move across the highway, leaving 1018 West Peachtree behind after nearly 40 years of television production.

In the years that followed, the front of the building was occupied by Comcast, which used it for offices and for storage, but by the time we visited in February 2009, in the waning days of analog television, Comcast had moved out, leaving behind only a series of gutted spaces full of dust and ghosts. (If the walls of that big empty studio at the middle of the building could talk...)

When we finally made it to 1018 West Peachtree for a tour, the only room still active in the building was the Channel 17 transmitter area, occupying a small space at the rear of the building behind what had been the WTBS control room and studio. The old WTBS Gates BT-110U transmitter, dating back to the 1970s, remained in place as a backup, supplanted in 1999 by a newer Harris Sigma (seen here in the midst of a tube replacement.)

But by then, WTBS itself had become something of an afterthought in the Turner empire, especially after Time Warner swallowed Turner in 1996. Instead of being a local Atlanta station fed to the nation (indeed, at one time, FCC rules mandated that the satellite feed had to shut down if the broadcast transmitter went off the air, leading Turner to install a low-power auxiliary channel 17 transmitter at Techwood just in case), "TBS" eventually became a national cable network that happened to be broadcast locally in Atlanta on a UHF signal. By the early years of the 21st century the only difference between the national TBS feed and the local Atlanta WTBS feed was a legal ID at the top of the hour, a Saturday-morning public affairs show, and some separate advertising content.

On October 1, 2007, channel 17 finally split from its TBS heritage completely, becoming a local independent station known as "Peachtree TV," with new calls WPCH-TV. By then, 1018 West Peachtree's days were seriously numbered, since WTBS-DT/WPCH-DT (on RF channel 20) was constructed at a different site, a Richland-owned tower located, ironically enough, right across Briarcliff Road from WAGA. When channel 17's analog signal went dark for good on June 12, 2009, this tower went dark as well, apparently slated for eventual dismantling.

But before we leave 1018 West Peachtree to its eventual fate, we offer a few more notes about this historic tower. First, we should mention that it's held several FM antennas in the 42 years that it's stood here. Most recently, it was home to Atlanta's 99.7 FM signal, first as WAPW and later as WNNX - and even after WNNX moved to the same Briarcliff tower as WPCH-DT, it continued to use the Channel 17 tower as an auxiliary site until very recently. (Indeed, Cumulus at one point had two FM auxes here - the 99.7, now WWWQ, and a lower-powered signal on 100.5 that was formerly WWWQ and now uses the WNNX calls.)

Second, there's that matter of "tallest self-supporting tower in America." There are four significant towers, all dating to the mid-sixties, that vie for this honor, and while the exact order of overall tower height has shifted somewhat as antennas have been replaced atop each of them, the FCC's Antenna Structure Registration records currently place this tower in fourth place, at 1031', behind the towers of Milwaukee's WITI (1080'), Boston's WHDH (1062') and Kansas City's KCTV (1042'), and ahead of San Francisco's Sutro Tower (976').

And third, there's that picture at the top of the page, offering an indication of just how prominent a midtown Atlanta landmark this tower is. Even now, after Turner Broadcasting has long since moved on to TNT and TBS and Cartoon Network and all the other services that emanate from the busy, crowded, high-tech Techwood complex, this big piece of steel still (for now) looms over the campus, a silent reminder of the good old days of Channel 17.

Thanks to Bill Magliocco for the tour - and for some fine Southern hospitality!

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