Driving down Snowville Road in Brecksville, Ohio, late last summer, I passed by a 12-acre parcel at 8200 just as a demolition crew was poking through the leveled remnants of a building that had occupied the site for nearly a century.
They may have been gleaning scraps of copper. It’s unlikely they knew much about the structure’s history.
It had been built to elegant standards in 1929 by the Van Sweringen brothers and Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company to house the transmission facilities of their newly-acquired radio station WTAM.
No expense was spared. Stylish faux stone streetlamps lined the driveway. An ornate outdoor chandelier hung above the front entrance of the stucco building, which sat nearly in the middle of the 14-acre site.
Inside were offices, a boiler room and a set of high-power DC generators to serve the new 50,000-watt transmitter, the first of its kind in Cleveland.
For the Van Sweringens, WTAM was merely a hometown public relations flourish. At that moment, they were said to be worth $3 billion, with massive railroad and real estate holdings.
Their stately Cleveland Union Terminal complex — Terminal Tower — would open to the public just months afterward.
The first antenna on site consisted of two 200-foot towers near the east and west property lines, supporting a horizontal, center-fed aerial.
The stock crash of October 1929 set in play a slow-moving economic tsunami that would eventually consume the Van Sweringens. So both they and the Illuminating Company may have been relieved to have the National Broadcasting Corporation remove WTAM from their books in 1930.
New tower
The looming depression had done little to blunt NBC’s appetite for expansion. Only three years old, this subsidiary of communications leviathan RCA had already established two profitable nationwide radio networks.
It upgraded WTAM immediately, replacing the inefficient horizontal aerial with a robust single 450-foot tower that is still in service today. WTAM could now be heard from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains, as Cleveland became a linchpin in NBC’s Red Network.
Although the main studios and business offices were in downtown Cleveland, NBC saw that nothing at 8200 Snowville Road was less than cutting edge. Following World War II, the network moved quickly to add broadcast transmission facilities for Cleveland’s second TV, WNBK Channel 4, and first FM, WTAM-FM 105.7, in late fall of 1948.
Things took a dramatic turn in 1956 when NBC decided to trade its Cleveland AM, FM and TV operations to Westinghouse in a controversial exchange for that company’s AM/FM/TV stations in Philadelphia. Rechristened as KYW, the transmission complex was moved to a new, much larger tower on Broadview Road in the suburb of Parma, and the 24/7 comings and goings at 8200 Snowville Road lapsed into silence.
The Smith years
Carl E. Smith, a trailblazer in radio antenna design, saw an opportunity and ultimately purchased the idle property, including the towers.
Smith had achieved early success with his 1934 founding of a technical correspondence school that became known worldwide as the Cleveland Institute of Electronics, and as an engineer with Cleveland’s first broadcast station, WHK.
Contracted by NBC to help get WTAM-FM on the air, Smith went on to build an international reputation for his work with high-power AM, FM and shortwave broadcast and defense-related systems.
By 1958, 8200 Snowville Road would also host both studios and transmitter of a new religious radio station, WCRF-FM, owned by the Moody Bible Institute. Still another FM station transmitter, serving WZAK, would be added to the site in 1964. Catholic radio WMIH(AM)’s studios were hosted for a brief period in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, the remaining portion of the building served to house Smith’s companies, Smith Electronics Inc. and Carl E. Smith Consulting Engineers. He even established his home on an adjacent property.
Among some of the unique features found in and around the building during that period were a fully-screen RF shielded enclosure for RFI/EMI measurements and certification, along with an analog computer designed to produce polar performance plots for AM directional antenna arrays.
There was an outdoor turntable with a ground plane, used to rotate antennas in free space for characterization measurements, as well as large vertically polarized log-periodic antennas operating in the HF band. Exotic prototype model antennas hung from the walls and ceilings inside the building, while a large searchlight mounted on the building exterior could be used to highlight the 450-foot tower at night with dramatic effect.
Goings and comings
The 1970s brought inevitable change. WCRF built a new studio/transmitter facility on Barr Road in Brecksville and left the building. Future broadcast tenants on the tower would construct their own buildings around its base.
NBC had managed to reacquire its former Cleveland AM/FM/TV combo in 1965 under the new call letters WKYC. But by 1972, it lost interest in its Cleveland radio outlets, spinning them off to a local group headed by the late Nick Miletti along with associates Tom and Jim Embrescia.
Station 1100 AM thus became WWWE, and 105.7 FM WWWM. After the transfer, NBC wanted WWWE(AM) to vacate its tower due to the technical challenges the combined operation posed. While WWWM(FM) was welcome to stay at the NBC Broadview Road site as a tenant, WWWE 1100 had to go.
So a lease was signed with Smith, a new concrete block building was erected, and WWWE’s 50 kW transmitter returned to 8200 Snowville Road in 1974, where it remains to this day. They would be joined by WBNX-TV Channel 55 from 1985 through 2000.
As Smith eased into retirement in the 1980s, Professional Engineers Al Warmus and Roy Stype would continue the work of CES Consulting Radio Engineers at 8200 Snowville, eventually moving to a new address in Bath, Ohio.
Carl Smith passed in 1998, and the entire site eventually was acquired by Vertical Bridge LLC. Carl’s son in law Jim Pollock continued to use the facility for RFI/EMI measurement work until his retirement and closure of the building several years ago.
Today WTAM(AM), WZAK(FM) and WAKS(FM) still operate from the tower, while Vertical Bridge pursues plans to subdivide the site for real estate development. The building is gone now, but its remarkable history and the spirit of those who shaped it endure.
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