|
Roxborough Towers Above Philly
by Scott Fybush
If you've ever driven the Schuylkill Expressway, Interstate 76
into Philadelphia, especially after dark, you've seen them: eight
tall towers, beacons flashing, all within a mile or so of each other
on a rise just above the Schuylkill River.
"Those red beacons would still be blinking," recalls
radio programmer Clarke Ingram of the early-morning bus rides he
would take from Pittsburgh to Atlantic City in the late 1960s. "As
a wide-eyed kid of eight or nine, I viewed those tall towers with
awe."
 |
| From left: WGTW(TV); the old WCAU(TV) tower; the new Philadelphia
digital TV tower; and the Banks, Fox and Gross towers. |
Philadelphia's radio community knows those towers as the "Roxborough
Tower Farm" - and more than a few engineers in the City of
Brotherly Love themselves view the site with something approaching
awe.
"It's not the highest point in the city, by any means,"
said Mark Humphrey, director of engineering for Radio One in Philadelphia
and the unofficial historian of the Roxborough farm. "But it
does have the ability to look into the Schuylkill Valley; and with
a tower height of 700 feet, you can see into the Delaware Valley
as far as you need to."
"It's not unusual to see towers that spread out, or short
towers clumped together," Humphrey reflected, "but when
you see so many tall towers within a half-mile of each other, that's
really something."
A half century ago...
Yet for all Roxborough's prominence in today's Philadelphia broadcast
scene -- it's now home to nearly all the market's FM and TV signals
-- it's not the birthplace of TV or FM in the city.
That honor goes to another Philadelphia neighborhood a few miles
to the north called Wyndmoor, where Philco put WPTZ(TV) Channel
3 on the air in 1941. WPTZ replaced an experimental signal, W3XE,
that had already been broadcasting for a decade by then.
So it fell to the city's second TV station, WFIL(TV) Channel 6,
to inaugurate the use of Roxborough for broadcasting. In 1947, WFIL
put up a 600-foot guyed tower on an open piece of land off Ridge
Pike, and an era had begun.
Just down the street, WFLN(FM) at 95.7 MHz built its own self-supporting
tower and signed on as the city's first independent FM station the
same year. Roxborough was off and running.
By the mid-'50s, Roxborough was already becoming the site of choice
for FM and TV. WCAU(TV) Channel 10, which had been using the landmark
Art Deco PSFS Building in Center City Philadelphia, needed a taller
tower; and because Philadelphia limited downtown buildings to the
height of William Penn's statue atop City Hall, that meant moving
to a tower out of Center City, which meant Roxborough.
The Philadelphia Bulletin, which sold WCAU(AM-FM-TV) to CBS in
1958, quickly acquired another FM construction permit and used the
new 1200-foot Dresser-Crane WCAU(FM-TV) tower on Domino Lane for
its new WPBS(FM) at 98.9 - and WPBS' all-important Muzak subcarrier
franchise - as well.
WPBS even built studios on Domino Lane that are still in use today
by its successor, WUSL(FM).
Channel 3 left its historic site in Wyndmoor in the late 1950s,
teaming up with WFIL(TV) to build a joint tower at Roxborough. The
1116-foot tower, which went up in 1957, dramatically expanded the
reach of Philadelphia's TV signals, spelling the end of attempts
to build local UHF stations in surrounding communities like Reading
and Allentown.
Channel 6's old tower remained standing, continuing in use for
WFIL(FM) at 102.1, now WIOQ, which is still there today.
UHF brings more steel
Roxborough kept sprouting in the '60s, as the advent of UHF TV
meant a need for more thousand-foot-plus towers.
The "Banks Tower" on Domino Lane went up across from
WCAU in the middle of the decade, named for William and Dolly Banks,
who owned both WWDB(FM) at 96.5 and WPHL(TV) Channel 17, which had
signed on from Wyndmoor but soon moved to Roxborough. Nearby, Irwin
and William Fox built the "Fox Tower" for their WIBF(TV)
Channel 29, while Kaiser Broadcasting leased land from Channel 6
to built a tower for WKBS(TV) Channel 48.
In 1979, the UHF dial filled out when Bill Gross built a tower
for WWSG(TV) Channel 57 on a Paoli Avenue property that Storer Broadcasting
had purchased 20 years earlier for an unsuccessful attempt to move
its WVUE(TV) Channel 12 into Philadelphia from Wilmington, Del.
The Banks Tower became the home of one of the first master FM antennas
in the country in the early 1970s, thanks to WPHL engineer Len Stevens.
 |
| Mark Humphrey of Radio One took this photo
of WPSG(TV)'s antenna being airlifted to the Gross tower. The
FM tower for WMGK/WMWX is attached to the base. Another tower
is at left. |
"He built a non-directional two-layer ERI cogwheel and installed
a combiner for three stations," Humphrey recalled. WMGK(FM)
at 102.9; WDVR(FM) at 101.1, now WBEB; and WRCP(FM) at 104.5, now
WSNI all moved to the master site and joined the tall-tower club
at that point.
Later, when the Channel 57 tower went up, 101.1 and 102.9 would
move there, joined by WXTU(FM) 92.5, which moved to Roxborough from
suburban Norristown; meanwhile, WYSP(FM) 94.1 moved from the old
Channel 6 tower to the Banks tower around the same time.
Now, stir in a three-tower AM
WRCP's AM signal on 1540 kHz also was calling Roxborough home by
then.
"That was originally a one-kilowatt nondirectional daytimer
somewhere in New Jersey," said Humphrey. With a CP in hand
to go to 50 kW, WRCP needed somewhere to put three towers.
"It was probably easy to put a tower there," Humphrey
surmises about the decision to add an AM signal to the FM and TV
facilities at Roxborough.
Whatever the reason, the existence of all that medium-wave RF amidst
the big TV and FM sticks posed a challenge for both sides, with
extra shielding a common feature at the tall towers - and, legend
has it, no end of trouble getting the AM directional array to tune
up properly.
RF isn't the only headache at Roxborough. Engineers there also
had to deal with a city trash transfer station and incinerator that
operated for decades on Domino Lane, right next door to the Fox
tower. While the city wasn't a bad neighbor - it even leased land
for the construction of the Fox tower and allowed one of that tower's
guy wires to go across the street onto its property - the incinerator
and the transmitters never got along well.
"It was a real maintenance nightmare for most of the engineers
because soot would get sucked into the transmitters," Humphrey
remembers. "It would cause corrosion inside the transmitters,
and the guy wires had to be greased regularly."
The incinerator is long gone, but the transfer station is still
in business on Domino Lane - surrounded by some tall new neighbors.
A new era of building
With the advent of digital TV in the late 1990s, Roxborough gained
two more tall towers.
 |
| On the left is the WGTW(TV)/WXPN/WPLY tower
and on the right is the old 'square cross-section' WUSL/WIOQ
tower, first built for WPVI(TV). |
Channels 3 and 6 put up the tallest tower yet, at 1,276 feet, with
a candelabra for both stations' DTV signals. Meanwhile, American
Tower, thwarted by neighborhood opposition to its plan to put up
a new tower northwest of the existing cluster, reached a deal with
channel 10, by then owned by NBC, to build a new tower on the WCAU
property on Domino Lane, replacing the old Channel 10 tower. The
latter was shortened for use as a standby site.
The new 1,256-foot tower, which went up in 1998, incorporates space
for FM tenants, with a four-bay ERI cogwheel panel array and a combiner
system. So far, Infinity's WOGL(FM) at 98.1, an historic occupant
of the Channel 10 tower dating to its days as WCAU(FM), is the only
tenant there.
American Tower is now the biggest operator in the tower farm; in
addition to the new Channel 10 tower, it owns the Banks (Channel
17) tower, the Gross (Channel 57) tower and the old WFLN(FM) tower.
And just this year, Roxborough landed still another big FM signal.
Radio One's WPLY(FM) at 100.3, licensed to Media, had long been
hampered by a tower site far out of town in Newtown Square, Pa.
In early May, "Y100" joined its sister station WPHI(FM)
103.9 at Roxborough, operating from a unique seven-panel ERI cogwheel
panel antenna on the Channel 48 tower.
Still growing
With eight towers over 1,000 feet; several shorter towers including
the original WFLN(FM) self-supporting tower, now being used by Fox's
WTXF(DT); 10 full-power analog TV signals; 11 DTVs; 16 FMs and,
yes, a 50-kW directional AM, Roxborough remains one of the nation's
most concentrated broadcast sites - nestled in a corner of Philadelphia
that feels as though it should be far outside the city limits, even
though it's just a few miles from City Hall.
"You drive back in that corner of Philadelphia and you'd think
you were in (very rural) Potter County," Humphrey said. "It's
very rural, and people like it that way."
Scott Fybush, a frequent RW contributor, publishes Tower
Site of the Week (www.fybush.com)
and has nearly driven off the Schuylkill Expressway several times
while gazing at the Roxborough towers.
|
