Saturday Morning On Radio Row

New York City

Most likely, every large city had their own version of 'Radio Row', back in the 30's or later and for many radio fans, a Saturday morning visit was the highlight of the week.



As a young shortwave-crazed kid in the 50's, there was nothing that I looked forward to more than the weekend and being able to stay up as late as I wanted, tuning the bands on my big old GE cathedral ... high up in my third-floor attic bedroom shack. But number two on the list was my weekly Saturday morning trip, by bus, to Vancouver's north Granville Street and then on to the library. There I could read the latest radio magazines as well as look at their huge archived collection of earlier issues.

In the 50's, there was a three block strip of radio shops on the north end of Granville street, just after the bridge into downtown Vancouver.

Granville Street

I imagine that it was similar to many other 'Radio Rows' ... kind of a mix between old and new and a little on the seedy side. It was a six or seven block walk from the bus stop to the radio stores and then another dozen back again to the library. The winters in Vancouver were always wet and dreary and I'd invariably get drenched in the process (I learned very early, that for some odd reason, Vancouverites never carried umbrellas!), but hey ... I was crazy about radio and what was a little rain.

During this same time span, once or twice per year, the family would pile into Dad's old Chevrolet and we would make a road-trip to Seattle. Unlike the present, our Canadian dollar was worth more than the American dollar back then, so there were always some great shopping bargains to be found. I recall there being a number of old radio shops as well as several surplus stores just south of Pike Street, on 1st Avenue as well as a few more, one or two blocks down the hill toward the docks. Maybe these were the last vestiges of Seattle's version of 'Radio Row'.

Of course nothing compares with the original 'Radio Row', located in the lower Manhattan district of New York City. It was born along with radio itself and by the early 30's the Cortlandt Street neighbourhood was blanketed with shops selling radios to consumers and components to builders. A Saturday morning trip to the Cortlandt Street paradise was a ritual for hundreds of radio fanatics for more than four decades, as seen in this timely old film taken one typical (Saturday?) morning on New York's 'Radio Row' ... what an amazing time it must have been!



From "The Death of New York's Radio Row", by Syd Steinhardt :

"Radio Row's popularity peaked in the 1950s. Its proximity to the New Jersey ferry docks and the financial district, combined with the advent of new consumer electronics goods and postwar demand, attracted floods of shoppers to the area every day except Sunday. To service their customers, stores opened at 7:00 a.m. on weekdays and closed late on Saturdays.

Radio Row was not a neat and pretty sight. Block upon block over 300 street level stores, with over three times as many enterprises in the floors above them were jammed into 20 to 25-foot storefronts, up and down streets such as Albany, Carlisle, Greenwich and Liberty. Their shelves and floor spaces were packed with vacuum tubes, condensers, transistors and other high-tech bric-a-brac for ham radio enthusiasts and do-it-yourselfers. It was, as the New York Times called it in 1950, "a paradise for electronic tinkerers." "

By the mid sixties, only a few radio shops remained and after some very bitter court battles, the remaining merchants were 'bought out' and the Cortlandt Street area was cleared so that construction could begin on the World Trade Center's twin towers. Today, the area is now home to One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the U.S.A. and to the 9/11 Memorial ... now all sacred ground.

courtesy: New York Port Authority

I was in New York City, three years after 9/11 and recall looking with much sadness into the multi-block deep hole in the ground ... how much happier it must have been there, back on those wonderful Saturday mornings, on 'Radio Row'.