Nobody has mentioned Jersey City, NJ as a city with no TV station. I haven't checked the U.S. census, but Jersey City's website says it has a population of nearly 242 thousand.
In fact, Jersey City was the largest municipality in the U.S. to have NO broadcast media licensed to it. AM 620, at the time owned by The Sporting News, successfully got the FCC to grant it a power upgrade coupled with changing its City of License from Newark to Jersey City. So now lowly Jersey City has one AM station licensed to it... but still no TV or FM.
And because New Jersey had no commecial VHF station licensed to it, as mentioned above, General Tire was able to save WWOR 9's license (and millions of dollars that went with it) by agreeing to move its city of license from NYC to a New Jersey municipality.
Why Secaucus which is not even a city? Secaucus is much smaller than many NJ cities nearby. Well, that happened to be where there were a lot of new office parks being built within a short drive of the Lincoln Tunnel. So the station moved into a new building in that community and used Secaucus as its new city of license. And if its TV trucks needed to cover something in NYC, it wasn't very far.
Secaucus is in the same county as Jersey City but I guess nobody thought to make Jersey City Channel 9's city of license, even though WWOR's studios and operations in Secaucus are close enough that it would have been within FCC rules to do that.
Gregg
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