[BC] Re: WABC on Columbia Island

[Scott Fybush]

At 04:13 PM 12/14/2005, Fred Gleason wrote:
>On Wednesday 14 December 2005 07:05, Dan Strassberg wrote:
> > I believe that the site was also substantially farther south than
> > Lodi--maybe near Bound Brook in central NJ.
>
>It was off of River Road in Bound Brook NJ, right on the border with
>Piscataway.  I grew up about two miles from the site, and can dimly remember
>the its being decommissioned in the mid/late 60s (I was around five years old
>at the time).  I don't know if it was still the primary site up to that time,
>or just being maintained as a backup.

We need to distinguish between the first WABC and the second, here! 
(I can't recall which one Dan was discussing in the original post.)

The original WABC, which became WCBS, was in Wayne NJ. The files that 
Xen posted earlier today contained the actual street name, which I 
didn't have before. I believe the tower in Wayne was a Blaw-Knox 
diamond. I have never seen a picture of the full tower - just a 
portion of it in the corner of the frame. That facility was on 860. 
By the time WABC moved to 880 in 1941, it was on Columbia Island. It 
became WCBS in 1946.

The second - and current - WABC took those calls in 1953. This is the 
station that was in "Bound Brook." I put the name in quotes because 
I've been told that the site was actually just over the line in 
Piscataway, though it had a Bound Brook mailing address. It was WJZ 
when it operated there, from the twenties until 1944, when it was 
abruptly relocated to Lodi. Why abruptly move a 50 kW AM station in 
the middle of the war? The Bound Brook site was owned by NBC and was 
where many of its shortwave transmitters, which had been pressed into 
wartime service by the government, were located. They needed to put 
up more SW antennas at Bound Brook, and WJZ was by then a tenant at 
the site (after the spinoff of NBC Blue into ABC a year earlier), so 
it was off to Lodi. The WJZ tower that stood in Bound Brook was 
dismantled in pieces and rebuilt at Lodi, and it still stands there today.

As Fred notes, Bound Brook remained in service for shortwave, at 
least as a backup, into the sixties. By then, VOA had gone from 
leasing commercial SW stations to either buying them outright 
(Bethany, Dixon, Delano) or building its own facilities (Greenville).

I believe CBS had some shortwave facilities at Wayne, also. I don't 
know how long those remained in service after the war. I've been told 
nothing remains of the site there, having been completely redeveloped 
for housing.

s