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late 40's/50's NYC TV,running film from Jersey

A

alok

I read years ago, that NYC TV stations ran all film programs from over in NJ ,in the early days of TV ,they microwaved it back to studio. The reason was the city had a tax on films shown for public viewing ,to avoid paying the tax this was done. Has anybody out there heard about this, was it true?

Also later I heard all film on NYC TV stations ran from the NYC TV stations transmitter sites. I think when they all relocated to the Empire State Building too, why was this done ,running all film from transmitter site?

Al
 
I would guess that the only New York area TV station in the late 1940's and 1950's that might have run film from New Jersey was the original commercial Channel 13 (WATV, later WNTA), which was based in Newark, and at first had it's tower in Jersey.

Even after their transmitter moved atop the Empire State Building, I believe their studios and offices stayed in Newark until the station went noncommercial as WNDT (now WNET).
 
Joe,you are correct about WATV/WNTA ,they did have studios in Newark ,they also had studios near Times Square.

The question I asked about film being run from Jersey on NYC TV stations was something I read years ago,if it is or is not true I never been able to verify it,hopefully somebody here can.
I don't think this running of film from New Jersey went on very long and most likely happened in the late 40's /early 50's.

Al
 
The original poster is correct, but it wasn't just the local NYC stations - it was the networks that maintained outposts in New Jersey to avoid the NYC film tax. NBC ran its film from a small facility in Englewood Cliffs, and ABC's was in Union City. Not sure where CBS had its location, if it used NJ at all.

The only station I know of that ran master control from the transmitter site at Empire was WOR-TV 9. WOR's original control point, from 1949 until the early 1950s, was at its original transmitter site in North Bergen. After the move to Empire (1953?), WOR briefly operated master control from studios at 67th and Broadway, but cost-cutting forced MCR to move to Empire after a few years, at which point any non-filmed programs had to originate from leased studio space. I'm not sure when WOR-TV relocated to 1440 Broadway, where it remained until the move to Secaucus in the 1980s. I do not believe the other major NYC stations used Empire for anything other than transmitter rooms, save for the very earliest experimental NBC transmissions in the 1930s.
 
Newark has a television history that spans four decades. New Jersey's first TV station WATV-13 began in 1948 at the Mosque Theatre, 1020 Broad Street, known as "Television Center Newark." Studios remained when sold in 1958 becoming WNTA-TV. Beginning in 1962 it was home to WNET. WNJU-47 occupied the studios from 1965 sign-on until moving to Teterboro in 1989.

WNTA also had studios in Times Square at 1481 Broadway, WOR arrived there in 1967
 
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