Follow Up…NBC Studio 3H, A Better Perspective

Early in the week, we saw a lot of video of this historic television studio in action in the the 1930s. With this photo, and today’s earlier posting of the original 1933 floor plans of the third floor, I hope to give you a clearer understanding of where everything was in television’s first studio.

In this 1937 photo, we are looking at the north wall of the studio. The top window is the control room on the 4th floor. The control rooms on this floor were all accessed by an employees only corridor behind them and against the outside wall of the building. Thirty feet feet behind this control room window is West 50th Street.

Behind the wall on the left, the west wall, there is a staircase and corridor from the 3H control room to the 3H studio floor and the door to that corridor is to our immediate left (not shown). 6th Avenue is on the other side of this wall.

On the right is the wall that separates 3H from 3F, and inside that wall is another set of stairs and a corridor from the 3F control room to the 3F studio floor. This is the wall that would be taken down in 1955 to merge these two studios (H and F), into NBC’s first inhouse color studio, 3K which debuted with a broadcast of ‘Howdy Doody’.

Directly behind us is the small third floor client viewing booth and over our heads is the large fourth floor visitor gallery window. Today, you enter the studio from here…the south wall, which opens into the main hallway. Back then, NBC tours bought in thousands of people each day and the tour groups used these main hallways…that’s why the backstage corridors were created, so techs and actors could move quickly from one place to another. There were also staff elevators but sometime before 1965, those elevators were taken out and became cable shafts. I find this history fascinating and hope you do too! Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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