When Lower Manhattan had a “Radio Row”

The Garment District, Flower District, Swing Street—the city has always been chopped into specialty areas.

And in the 1920s with the rise of broadcast radio, Cortlandt and Dey Streets were home to Manhattan’s radio district, aka Radio Row.

The row was more than that; dozens of shops lined local streets.

“Cortlandt once ran from the Hudson River up to Broadway, but now only one block—from Trinity Place to Broadway—remains,” wrote The New York Times in 1981.

“The rest, displaced by the World Trade Center, was a rabbit warren of electrical shops with books on radios stacked up on sidewalks and piles of tubes, condensers, old radios and old radio cabinets set alongside.”

Radio Row adapted to changing times in the 1950s. Stores that sold televisions and hi-fis moved in alongside the radio shops.

Its demise had little to do with the fall of radio and instead can be blamed on the World Trade Center.

In 1961, politicians called for the use of eminent domain to raze Radio Row’s small blocks so the Twin Towers could be built.

Radio Row’s store owners tried fighting it out in court. They lost, getting just $3,000 each from the state to go elsewhere.

[Top photo: Radio Row in the 1960s, copyright Antique Broadcast Classified. Right: a crowd gathers on November 22, 1963, after JFK is assassinated in this Library of Congress photo]

Ghost businesses that left their mark on the city

Hiding in plain sight are signs and logos of companies that bit the dust long ago. Either no one bothered to take them down—or they’re part of the building and can’t be removed.

Bickford’s is the old-school “lunchroom” chain that used to be all over New York from the 1920s to the 1960s. This one on Eighth Avenue in the 40s has been empty for years.

One of my favorites is this logo for the Fischer & Co. Pure Pork Products headquarters, a two-story building on Second Avenue at 118th Street.

I couldn’t find a trace of this company anywhere. The 2-story building now houses a dry cleaner.

“Tree-Mark Shoes” is carved into the facade of the building that now houses Bowery Ballroom, on Delancey Street.

The company moved in after World War II and spent the next three decades there, according to The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited.