• My Account
  • Your Profile
  • Member Archives
Sunday, June 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 5/25/18: iHeart Radio, New York

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
May 25, 2018
in Free Content, New Jersey, New York, Tower Site of the Week
0

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

It’s hard to believe it’s been a decade since what was then Clear Channel moved five FM stations from five separate facilities in two states into a single massive studio complex in lower Manhattan.

But it really was way back in 2008 when we showed you all those “before” shots, and while we’ve been back in the city plenty of times for visits to what’s now iHeart Radio, it’s always nice to take a step back and get a full new tour of the place, as we did during AES/NAB New York week last October.

iHeart performance studio lobby
iHeart performance studio lobby
Green room
Green room

There’s nothing on the outside of the old AT&T Long Lines building at Sixth Avenue and Walker Street that tells you a huge radio cluster lives inside – and if you come the right way by subway, you don’t even need to go outside, since there’s an exit from the Canal Street A/C/E station right into the lobby. And if you walk straight out from that exit across the majestic Art Deco lobby, you’ll walk right into the iHeart Radio Theater, the performance space that’s an important part of this cluster.

Control room
Control room
Performance studio
Performance studio

This being New York, and iHeart being iHeart, you can imagine the big names who’ve been on this little stage and back in the green room down the hall over the years. (I’m sure my teenager would have loved one of those sofa pillows…)

And this being 2018, this isn’t just a radio studio; that control room off the back of the theater space can handle HD video and streaming, too.

iHeart lobby
iHeart lobby
Production rooms off the lobby
Production rooms off the lobby

Most of iHeart is a few floors up – office space on the second floor (and some space way upstairs, too), and the important part from our perspective, the broadcast studios that sprawl across the third floor.

This was an unusual space ten years ago, and it still is. For one thing, it’s largely windowless, as you’d expect for a building that went up primarily to house phone switches. For another, it was deliberately designed for the needs of five stations’ staffs who were accustomed to competing against each other from five separate locations.

And so once you walk in past the all-white lobby (with several small production rooms right there behind the lobby sofas), there’s not a lot of common space here.

Dunkin Donuts lounge
Dunkin Donuts lounge
Power 105 lobby
Power 105 lobby

Head in one direction off the lobby and you’ll see one of those rare common spaces, another smaller live-performance area that’s been carved out and heavily branded by Dunkin Donuts.

Beyond that, we start to get into each of the individual pods that was walled off for each of the FMs. Each one has its own entryway with station branding, opening into a call-screener area that looks into a mirror-image pair of studios.

Power 105 studio
Power 105 studio
Rack room
Rack room

After a decade in use, some of these studios are already getting a refresh – that one, above, for WWPR (Power 105), got some new furniture not long after our visit, though the SAS Rubicon consoles remained. (So did a feature unique to Power, the turntables in the DJ booth where live mix shows can originate.)

All the studios connect back to the spacious rack room at the core of the complex, where there’s lots of automation horsepower, audio processing and a very robust STL network that connects this facility to main transmitters up at the Empire State Building, an aux facility at 4 Times Square and an emergency studio facility over in New Jersey.

Preserved in one rack here is something especially poignant: the studio end of what was once the hookup between WKTU’s New Jersey studio and the transmitter site at the World Trade Center that it lost back in 2001.

Rack room
Rack room
A bit of history
A bit of history

Moving back out of the engineering core and its long row of glassed-in walls, we make our way around the circuit to see each of the other FM stations’ studio pods.

WLTW's pod
WLTW’s pod
WLTW studio
WLTW studio

WLTW (Lite 106.7) is painted in a soothing shade of violet, while down the hall WKTU (103.5) has its studios decorated in a cheery light blue.

WKTU studio
WKTU studio
WKTU studio
WKTU studio

The engineers here have their offices down at the end of the hallway past the rack room, and outside their row of cubicles is an arrangement of monitors that keeps tabs on the health of all the moving parts that make up this cluster and all the revenue it generates.

Status update in engineering
Status update in engineering
Hollywood Hamilton studio
Hollywood Hamilton studio

In addition to the five local FMs (and, as we’ll see in a moment, a later AM addition), there’s plenty of network activity happening here in market number one for iHeart and Premiere Networks. Above, for instance, we see the studio where Hollywood Hamilton’s weekend countdown show is produced; below, we see a utility studio that handles all sorts of national content for Premiere. If there’s an awards show or live music festival on iHeart nationwide, it’s a very good bet that the audio is passing through this control room, and if you’re hearing a musician doing live appearances on local shows around the country from New York, they’re likely sitting across the glass in the studio here.

Premiere studio
Premiere studio
...and control room
…and control room

On to that AM addition: in 2012, Clear Channel added WOR (710) to its cluster, and in late 2013 it moved WOR from 111 Broadway (down by Wall Street) halfway back uptown to join the FMs here at 32 Avenue of the Americas. (WOR had only been at 111 for a few years at that point after moving from its very longtime home at 1440 Broadway; those studios at 111 were very quickly filled by Salem’s WMCA and WNYM, and we need to get back there eventually to see them again.)

WOR newsroom
WOR newsroom
WOR talk studio
WOR talk studio

When WOR moved in here, it took over what had been office space at the back of the building. There’s a newsroom back here, several production rooms (built out, in part, for a national morning syndication offering that never materialized), and two big talk studio/control rooms, one of them looking out to a glassed-in area that can be used for call screening or for a guest’s entourage.

(And yes, this is also the hub of the Mets Radio Network, which is why the new WOR logo is orange and blue.)

WOR studios
WOR studios
Elvis Duran control room
Elvis Duran control room

The main WOR control room looks out, a little incongruously, at another newer space, the former programming office that was turned into the studio/control room complex for “Elvis Duran in the Morning” as it expanded beyond being just the WHTZ (Z100) morning show into a national product.

Elvis' view
Elvis’ view
Light-up desk
Light-up desk
Duran's mic
Duran’s mic

In addition to the usual SAS gear, this studio has some very special features. That Corian countertop isn’t uniformly thick: there are squares at each talent position that are cut out very thinly and lit from below to tell each cast member whether their mic is off the air, on locally at Z100 or on nationally on the network.

And at the end of the desk, where Duran himself serves as ringleader every morning, there’s a unique gold-plated RE27 with his name engraved on it. (You’ll recall, perhaps, that at the NAB Show a few months later, SAS’ Al Salci presented Duran with a companion gold-anodized console!)

The Duran studio, in turn, looks into the main Z100 studio complex, where that step-and-repeat wall at the far end is motorized – it can display either Duran’s logo or Z100’s, depending on which artist is in there for pictures.

Z100 studios
Z100 studios
Z100 air studio
Z100 air studio

The Z100 air studios are done up in green, with that back hallway leading to Duran’s greenroom and music offices.

Q104 studios
Q104 studios
Maria Milito on the air
Maria Milito on the air

Around the last corner, we find one more important piece of this cluster, classic rock WAQX (Q104.3), with a slightly different layout that includes a record library down a short corridor that leads to a small window, lots of guitars lining the outside studio walls, and veteran midday talent Maria Milito holding down the fort in the main air studio.

Thanks to Jeff Smith, George Marshall and the rest of the iHeart engineering crew for the tours!

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: A Taste of England, November 2017

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: iHeartWAXQWHTZWKTUWLTWWORWWPR
Previous Post

NERW 5/21/2018: AM Silence in Albany

Next Post

NERW 5/28/18: Remembering Steve Mindich

Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

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

Related Posts

Top of the Tower Podcast #65: Back and Forth With PA’s Jason Togyer
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #65: Back and Forth With PA’s Jason Togyer

In this week's episode - Top of the Tower is back with a new spring/summer season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio! This week, it's another joint episode, a two-way chat with my good friend Jason...

by Scott Fybush
June 22, 2025
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/16/2025: Townsquare, Corus Cut Deeper
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 6/16/2025: Townsquare, Corus Cut Deeper

In this week’s issue… Oneonta signals go dark - Whiteoaks takes over in Niagara - Corus empties Ottawa studios - CBS-FM shuffles talent - Armstrong anniversary to be honored

by Scott Fybush
June 16, 2025
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/9/2025: Urgency Grows for Public Media
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 6/9/2025: Urgency Grows for Public Media

In this week’s issue… Public broadcasters plead for help - Connoisseur restructures leadership - Pennsylvania AM goes dark - Succession plan for veteran college radio manager

by Scott Fybush
June 9, 2025
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/2/2025: A WOW Moment for WATR
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 6/2/2025: A WOW Moment for WATR

In this week’s issue… Car dealership goes terrestrial - Lawsuit uncovers Connoisseur's attempted bids for Audacy, Cox - New newsroom for WNBC, WNJU - Remembering Buffalo's Deeb, Batavia's Platt

by Scott Fybush
June 4, 2025
Next Post
NERW 5/28/18: Remembering Steve Mindich

NERW 5/28/18: Remembering Steve Mindich

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.