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Radio Row was the center of New York City’s electronics trade from the 1920s to the 1960s
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The location has been described as “one of the oldest, most important and most colorful malls” in New York, USA.
However, that didn’t stop it from being expropriated and demolished to build the World Trade Center (WTC) and its famous twin towers in its place. On April 4th, the official inauguration of the WTC celebrated its 50th anniversary.
The place was called Radio Row and was considered New York’s first “technology district” due to the high concentration of companies dedicated to the sale of equipment and components for radio, television and household appliances.
According to journalist Martin Arnold in The New York Times of April 20, 1962, Radio Row was “best known as the East Coast center of sound quality and amateur radio enthusiasts.”
“There are numerous flower and plant shops, hardware stores, bookstores, restaurants and hundreds of other shops in the region.”
Radio Row then occupied about 13 blocks in Lower Manhattan. Its boundaries were Barclay Streets to the north; church in the east; freedom in the south; and the Hudson River to the west. Its main axis was Cortlandt Street.
This thriving commercial area would eventually disappear, but not without fighting valiantly to survive.
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Despite the presence of different types of stores, Radio Row was characterized by a high concentration of trade in radio equipment and other household appliances.
From new to top
Radio Row took shape in the early 1920s, before radio had revolutionized global communications.
In 1921 a merchant named Harry Schneck opened City Radio the first specialty store on Cortlandt Street.
“Radio was new. “Most people were intimidated by him,” Harry Schneck’s son, Bill Schneck, said on the Radio Diaries podcast in 2014.
“The idea that information would come through the air, through the ether, was something a step away from black magic.”
From then on, dozens of similar shops opened their doors in the same area and together they founded Radio Row.
By 1929, other companies were already operating a few yards from City Radio, including Vim Radio, Radio Fair, Black Radio, Pryce Radio, Arrow Radio and SNS Radio, according to Foxproduced Movietone footage of the period.
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In the 1920s, radio was still new to the population.
This region became a reference not only for residents of New York, but also for customers and fans from other locations who went to Radio Row knowing they could find the radios they were looking for or other related items.
Large quantities of goods were displayed in the shop windows and the owners tried to lure customers with loudspeakers by playing different genres of music.
Until the Second World War, shops were open six days a week and closed at 9 or 10 p.m. But the beginning of the conflict brought difficult times, among other things, due to the lack of products and spare parts.
The downturn was relatively brief, and by the 1950s the increasing success of televisions which were also sold on Radio Row ushered in a new phase of prosperity for the region’s commerce.
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Protests against the demolition of Radio Row to build the World Trade Center included the “Symbolic Funeral of Small Business Owners” in July 1962.
protests and expropriations
But the lucky streak didn’t last long. In the early 1960s, the New York City Port Authority announced plans to build the World Trade Center on the exact spot where Radio Row was located.
The project was backed by millionaire David Rockefeller and the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA), an organization formed by important business people and corporations with an interest in this New York area.
The Port Authority thought this was a good suggestion and decided to adopt it as their own suggestion.
The news was not well received by small traders on Radio Row, especially after it became clear that the new World Trade Center complex would spell the end of the technology district that was a landmark in the city.
In response to the plans, Radio Row dealers organized a legal battle and public opinion campaign in defense of the trade.
Credit, courtesy of the US Library of Congress
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A crowd gathered on Radio Row to hear the news of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in November 1963
“Our intention is to fight. This is not a foreign country where the government can just put a man out of business,” the movement’s leader, Oscar Nadel, said in an April 1962 statement to The New York Times.
“This is a world center for home electronics that they will now destroy for real estate interests to appropriate.”
At the time, Nadel said there were around 1,600 stores on Radio Row and sales volume was $300 million a year about $3 billion in current values, or about R$14.4 billion. The Radio Row company employed around 30,000 people.
Small businesses complained that the region chosen for the new development was a successful commercial area. Certainly there were buildings in poor condition, but many had been renovated by the merchants themselves and without any government help.
They also stressed that while they were ousted by a project by a public body (the Port Authority), the beneficiaries of the expropriation would be the large private companies that would operate in the region in the future.
Nadel and the petty traders went to court. At the same time, they encouraged street protests against the WTC project and against thenGovernor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, who had given the green light to his brother David Rockefeller’s proposal.
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Inaugurated in 1973, the Twin Towers were built on the same site as Radio Row in New York.
In July 1962, Radio Row dealers organized a symbolic funeral to raise awareness of the cause. They carried a black coffin with the inscription “Here lies the small business owner” through the city.
But all efforts were in vain. In November 1963, the United States Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit brought by retail traders on the grounds of lack of jurisdiction.
In practice, the court removed the legal impediments to the construction of the WTC and, with it, Radio Row’s disappearance.
The World Trade Center officially opened nearly a decade later—including the Twin Towers that were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.