Map of CBS New York Studios And Properties: 1960
Map of CBS New York Studios And Properties: 1960
This rare map will give you an idea of how much real estate CBS owned and leased in the city in 1960. Thanks to someone with a red pencil, we see the studio locations circled. Notice that the Broadcast Center on W 57 Street is referred to as the Production Center, which was the buildings original designation as a CBS property. In the lower left quadrant you see the Grand Central studios location and just under it, the Graybar Building which housed CBS News offices, but no studios. Somewhat like ABC’s studio designations, the map maker used shorthand and calls Ed Sullivan’s Studio 50, TV 50 and so on for all the other studio locations. Tomorrow, we’ll see another rare map that shows the studios before and after consolidation into the Broadcast Center in 1964. Thanks to our friend Gady Reinhold for this very interesting piece of television history.
After the demise of DuMont it seemed that the successor company rented out studio space at the 205 East 67th Street complex. I’ve seen studio lists from the ’50s with all three major networks renting space inside. And why not? In the era before videotape, a good space wired into NY Telephone/AT&T video/audio lines with lights, cameras, stagehands and technicians was always a hot commodity.
The West 55th Street film lab must have been DuArt. CBS maintained their News film editing rooms there in the space that later became Rombex Productions where I worked in the mid-70s. Eventually it became DuArt Video which is now the entire building since they closed the film lab.