Dumont: The Start Of WABD, New York
On December 20, 2012
- TV History
Dumont: The Start Of WABD, New York
This photo was taken April 15, 1946 and shows the inaugural broadcast from the new Dumont studio at Wanamaker’s department store in Manhattan. The telecast was fed to Dumont’s W3XWT (WTTG) in Washington for broadcast there, and in Washington, some FCC officials making congratulatory comments were fed back to New York and viewed by the audience here. At the time, only NBC was further along in network transmissions. By early 1947, both the Dumont and NBC flagship stations in NY were presenting a few hours of programming three or four nights a week for local viewers and affiliates in other northeastern cities.
Here’s a shot of the auditorium before DuMont took it over. In the above photo, the original stage would be on the left side of the photograph. In other words, in the full-auditorium shot, the camera would be on the right looking toward the left. Department stores had auditoriums in the days before radio. They featured oratory, piano and organ concerts, and various other types of auditorium fare. Goldblatt’s Department Store in Chicago (now DePaul University) had an auditorium on the eighth floor, and that became both a WGN radio and television studio while the WGN-TV Building was being constructed at 441 North Michigan Avenue between 1947 and 1951 (dates approximate). I spent many hours in Goldblatt’s Auditorium as a child attending “Let’s Have Fun” with Hank Grant. They used TK-30A’s mounted on tripod dollies. http://theatreorganjournal.org/Archives/11-2010/wanamak/Aud1904Int.jpg