In Philadelphia, Broadcasting Begins in Roxborough

“From a new tower standing almost 910 feet above sea level and located in the population center of the greater Philadelphia area in a region clear of the obstacles encountered in mid-city sites …”

In a full-page ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer the morning of Oct. 4, 1949, TV Channel 6, then WFIL(TV), had begun transmitting from a tower at the corner of Umbria Avenue and Domino Lane in the city’s Roxborough section. 

The Inquirer cited a series of “extensive tests” to determine the population center of the area and the probable quality of reception. 

The 1949 tower is still used by two Class B FM stations in Philadelphia. It was the first tower of what would grow into a “farm” of broadcast towers. 

Today, Roxborough is home to approximately 16 Philadelphia FM stations and 21 TV stations, and it is unique.

Similar farms serving metropolitan areas like Minneapolis’ Shoreview, Dallas’ Cedar Hill and Los Angeles’ Mount Wilson might come to mind. But at Roxborough, 13 significant towers stand within approximately a half-mile span.

It’s not the highest spot in Philadelphia. Summit Street in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood takes that claim.

And it’s not where the city’s tall skyscrapers stand. Center City, as it’s known, is about seven miles to the southeast. Roxborough has a much more suburban feel. 

But if you look at a map of the Philadelphia designated market area, Center City Philadelphia is not quite the geographic center. If you factor in satellite eastern Pennsylvania markets like Allentown–Bethlehem and Reading, Roxborough is. 

“It just happened to fit as an ideal location,” engineer Mark Humphrey said. 

Timing, typically, was everything.

Northwest Philly

Humphrey does not consider himself Roxborough’s resident historian and he is quick to defer to the long pipeline of engineers who have come through the City of Brotherly Love. 

But the central New York native is an encyclopedia of knowledge for the farm. 

In 1984, Humphrey moved south to become chief engineer of Temple University’s 90.1 WRTI(FM) and he was thereafter connected to this part of Philadelphia. 

WRTI had its antenna mounted on the southeast side of the tower at 8200 Ridge Ave., about a mile to the northwest of the farm. The old 95.7 WFLN at its standalone Ridge Ave. tower, dating back also to October 1949, was technically the first FM station to call Roxborough home. 

I connected with Humphrey on an unusually cloudy day to get the lowdown on the site’s history.

I’d been to Roxborough many times — I interned at the former 106.1 WJJZ(FM), which had its studios co-located with then-Clear Channel’s 98.9 WUSL(FM) at 440 Domino Lane in Roxborough, up until 2006. But I’d never gone just to check out the towers.

Driving around the winding neighborhoods in the northwest corner of Philadelphia, it’s easy to forget you’re within the sixth-most populous U.S. city.

Some areas, including where American Tower had desired to place its “candelabra” tower around the turn of the century before residents defeated the plan, aren’t very developed at all.

“It’s like you took a left turn on Spring Lane and landed in Potter County a mile down the road,” Humphrey said, referring to the county in Pennsylvania’s rural northern tier known as “God’s country.”

The towers’ proximity has, of course, caused some amusing observations from Roxborough’s nearly 30,000 residents over the years. A WHYY feature in 2013 profiled a family on Harmon Road hearing music or voices originating from their basement pipes.

“Occasionally, they pick up what must sound like heavenly messengers — but is actually Christian programming that they receive through their rain spout,” Alan Jaffe wrote of the Brody family.

Despite these quirks, investigators, including Carl T. Jones Corp., have found no long-term health concerns.

Overall, Roxborough has a much more suburban feel than the rest of Philadelphia. In fact, the neighborhood proclaims itself as one of the “greenest sections of any city.”

But nearly everywhere you turn, the towers are impossible to miss.

“There wasn’t nearly as much development in this portion of Philadelphia in the 1950s and ’60s,” Humphrey said. 

“You would have had a lot more opposition now, and I don’t think towers would have gone up nearly as easily.”

Dating back more than 75 years 

Humphrey explained that an experimental station at Philco, the former major manufacturer of radio and TV equipment in northwest Philadelphia, W3XE, is where Philo Farnsworth did many of his experiments.

Two FM signals — 97.5 WPEN(FM) and 106.1 WUMR(FM) — transmit from Mermaid Lane, in the Wyndmoor section of Philadelphia, once the site of the city’s first TV station, the experimental W3XE.

“That was the beginning of KYW TV,” Humphrey said.

That station, which received a commercial license as WPTZ in July 1941, was the first station outside New York City and the third one in the U.S. overall. Westinghouse purchased WPTZ from Philco in 1953 for a then-record $8.5 million.

Meanwhile, TV Channel 6, WFIL(TV) and owned by Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Publications, which also included the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, filed for a construction permit to move its transmitter location to Roxborough in 1948. Channel 6 had begun transmitting in 1947 from atop the Widener Building in Center City from a three-bay antenna on sister station WFIL(FM)’s tower.

Triangle’s license was granted for WFIL from Roxborough in 1949 and it began transmitting from a four-sided guyed tower on Umbria St., the original Roxborough tower.

The Oct. 5, 1949 edition of the Inquirer explained that the night prior, Channel 6 went live with a special program commemorating its move to a “super-turnstile” antenna that towered 909 feet above sea level. 

“The station acknowledged a flood of calls from TV set owners reporting better reception,” the Inquirer said of Channel 6’s new Roxborough signal. 

In 1954, the Philadelphia Bulletin’s TV Channel 10, WCAU(TV) and sister station 98.1 WCAU(FM) moved from the PSFS Building in Center City to Roxborough. 

WCAU celebrated the occasion that summer by handing Philadelphia city officials a large plastic sheet containing signatures of the mayors of 10 cities the station claimed were now within its coverage area from its new 1,000-foot tower, according to the Broadcasting Yearbook.

Three years later, seeking improved tower height, Channel 6 and Channel 3 (then WRCV) joined forces to put up an 1,100-foot tower on land that Annenberg owned. Channel 3 moved from Wyndmoor and Channel 6 moved to the higher structure. 

That 1957 tower still stands, too, and it’s the home of Channel 6’s broadcast antenna today.

102.1, then WFIL(FM), had begun broadcasting in 1947 the Widener Building in Center City, where its AM side, 560 AM, had been for a decade. It had originally begun operating in 1942 at 45.3 MHz with the callsign W53PH.

Also in 1957, 102.1 came over to Roxborough and began transmitting from the original Channel 6 tower. 

The next major tower to be erected is what’s known as the “Banks” tower, which went up at the farm in 1965, and it also stands high at 1,095 feet. TV Channel 17 signed on in 1960, according to a history of the site by Scott Fybush. It was purchased by the Philadelphia Broadcasting Company four years later, then owned by Aaron Katz and Leonard Stevens.

In 1965, it moved to the new tower at 329 Domino Lane.

According to Fybush, Stevens was related to William and Dolly Banks, owners of 1340 WHAT(AM) and, at the time, 96.5 WHAT(FM). 96.5 would end up on the tower for a time, and they would ultimately change its call letters to their initials, WWDB(FM).

Down on Domino 

I met Mark Humphrey, Travis Martin, the director of engineering at Radio One in Philadelphia, Jared Styles, the director of engineering at WXPN(FM) and Zach Maupin, assistant engineer at WXPN, at Tony Roni’s, a pizza shop right at the corner of Domino Lane and Ridge Avenue in Roxborough.

The Ivy Ridge Shopping Center isn’t directly “under the towers.” But less than a half mile up a hill, the six towers that are north of 1,000 feet in height are easily in view.

From where we ate lunch at the Ivy Ridge Shopping Center, just down the hill on Domino Lane is a building constructed for the one-time Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper, and it would be the home of 98.9 WPBS — Philadelphia Bulletin Station. It’s the same building that I spent a summer as an intern for WJJZ 20 years prior. 

The station studios would stay on Domino Lane through multiple format changes — as soft adult contemporary, changing its calls to WUSL(FM), for the “U.S. 1” moniker in the late 1970s, country music briefly in the 1980s, and then its present-day hip hop format from 1982 onward — until owner Clear Channel moved it to the other side of the Schuylkill River in Bala Cynwyd in 2006.

To facilitate the transition from analog to digital TV, WUSL relocated its antenna in 1998 to the original Channel 6 tower site, where its transmitter is now diplexed with sister iHeartMedia station WIOQ(FM).

100.3 FM, then and now

As Humphrey explains the history, there is a natural synergy between him and Martin, the past and present Radio One chief engineers.

Humphrey recalls how 100.3 was the first station in the market to run RDS fulltime. Allen Hartle, founder of The Radio Experience (later sold to Broadcast Electronics), had designed a roadside billboard display for KZOK in Seattle. “There were approximately 1,500 five-watt wedge-base lamps in the matrix,” Humphrey said.

Along Interstate 95 near Penn’s Landing in the late 1990s, “Y-100” had a billboard with the artwork of a Denon car radio display that was linked to RDS.

In the air studio was a PC running software Hartle had developed. Humphrey explained how he rigged its keyboard with an optocoupler across the Enter key. Each time a CD player started, the keyboard was pulsed to the next song title in the playlist copied onto a floppy disk; then, “Now Playing” data showed on RDS, as well as the Y-100 website.

Hartle deserved credit for the software, Humphrey said, but our table could not help but marvel at how ahead of its time this solution was.

Martin, the 100.3 engineer of today, led us out of Tony Roni’s to the first stop on our antenna farm tower. 

Stress-free management 

We headed to the broadcast site of KYW(TV) and Radio One’s WRNB.

Martin gave us a tour of WRNB’s equipment rack, including its water-cooled, GatesAir Flexiva analog and HD Radio transmitter, which Radio One installed in 2023.

His only concern at the moment was scheduled downtime at the KYW/WPVI tower to add a new antenna. WRNB would have to switch over to its Newtown Square auxiliary site for a day or two in the middle of the month.

“Will it be seamless?” I asked.

“Check with the site manager,” Martin deadpanned, looking at Humphrey.

Martin’s relatively stress-free management at Roxborough contrasts with the access issues at One Liberty Place, the home of sister station WPPZ(FM) in Center City.

A video of a YouTuber who climbed to the top of the building — and touched the active antenna spiral that Radio One’s WPPZ and WMMR use — can make simply getting up to equipment rooms a challenge.

“It went viral and we’re still paying for its security consequences,” Martin said.

Next, we moved to the Gross Tower transmitter building, the home to WXPN.

The tower went up in 1979 to broadcast WWSG(TV), owned by William S. Gross, on Channel 57.

As we entered, Humphrey explained that a portion formerly housed “wireless cable” equipment transmitting in the Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service (MMDS) band.  

Philadelphia was not fully wired for cable TV until sometime in the 1990s.  “Without cable TV, there was a market for pay television transmitted over the air,” he explained.

However, a special grid parabolic antenna was needed to receive the microwave transmission, the kind you still sometimes see on top of low houses, he said. Gross originated the service from the tower and had a transmit antenna installed.

“There’s been a lot of transition here,” Humphrey said of the Gross Tower.

He’s been part of it. After he became WRTI’s chief engineer, Gross offered Temple University antenna space at the 980-foot level of his TV tower. Humphrey helped orchestrate WRTI’s move.

Channel 57, now WPSG, no longer broadcasts from the site, as it moved to the tall Channel 3/Channel 6 tower.

For WXPN’s Styles and Maupin, meanwhile, they’re part of keeping the engine humming of a highly regarded operation in the Delaware Valley. It’s also heard on Class B1 outlets in Middletown, Pa., on 88.7 WXPH(FM) and Hackettstown, N.J., on 91.9 WXPJ(FM). 

Operated by the University of Pennsylvania, XPN runs an adult album alternative format. It moved to the Gross Tower in 2007 from the former Channel 48 tower. WXPN runs 2.6 kW ERP as a Class B FM station.

But its 1,198 ft. height above average terrain, using a 5-bay ERI antenna attached to WPSG’s analog pylon, is the second-highest HAAT of any of the Roxborough FMs, just behind fellow noncom WRTI.

“A huge improvement with half the power,” Styles said.

Its Harris Z8HD transmitter was installed in 2007. At the time of writing that Z8HD is slated to become an auxiliary — as Humphrey helped install a GatesAir FAX5 main transmitter for WXPN this June.

Many days and nights 

As many towers as there are in Roxborough, there is not one to each station.

That means engineers from competing organizations have to work together to ensure each other’s stations operate efficiently.

Ben Hill worked more than four decades as a broadcast engineer in Philadelphia, from the late 1970s until he retired as chief engineer at 94.1 WIP(FM) in 2022.

He knows the engineering scene, and by association, Roxborough, as well as anyone. 

Hill was also chief engineer of Roxborough tenants WIOQ from 1989–1999 and WDAS(FM) from 1999–2004, and worked for years at KYW(AM) and the former WSNI(FM) before that.

“I spent many days and many nights at that farm,” Hill recalled rather affectionately.

Filled with chain-link fences that separate dirt roads from the streets like Domino, Umbria and Paoli, just getting to the base of the towers could sometimes be treacherous. 

But with engineering being a tight-knit community to begin with, particularly in Philly, there was a sense of community.

“It got to the point where we each had our own transmitter-room door,” Hill said.

He also remembered the help from vendors. So many of Roxborough’s stations use ERI antennas, and Tom Silliman, the company’s president and CEO, would often come down for hands-on assistance.

If equipment needed to be swapped out or added, there was a common courtesy among the parties who frequented Roxborough.

“The companies didn’t get along, but we engineers got along fabulously,” Hill said.

Hill said that a particularly memorable moment for him at Roxborough was directing a successful deployment of a Shively antenna atop WIOQ’s tower — the Channel 6 original. The side-mounted antenna improved the station’s signal right down the Atlantic City Expressway, toward the Shore, Hill recalled.

But there were also some long days where even going home was no escape.

The intersection of Domino Lane and Umbria Avenue was the site of Philadelphia’s northwest trash  incinerator that opened in 1960. 

Families on social media recall going down to the incinerator site to toss in bags of waste.

Philadelphia’s Public Interest Law Center’s website wrote that there were numerous complaints from Roxborough and Manayunk residents about smoke, odors and ash.

Hill experienced this firsthand.

“I’d go out to my car and it would be covered in soot,” Hill said. 

If engineers were working outside, silica-like dust might cover their clothes after a few hours, depending on incinerator activity.

The site closed in 1989 following a consent decree with the city of Philadelphia.

More recently the city opened the Northwest Transfer Station, a modernized facility for solid waste and recycling.

Across the Delaware Valley

We’re not talking about thousands of feet of elevation anywhere close to the river valley that runs up and down the Delaware River, which separates Pennsylvania from New Jersey.

But the Atlantic Seaboard Fall Line, where the Piedmont and Atlantic coastal plain meet, falls smack-dab right through the city of Philadelphia.

The elevation of Center City Philadelphia is not much above sea level. Roxborough, to the west of the fall line, is approximately 250 ft. above sea level. 

That slight boost, plus its central location to Philly’s western suburbs and the Lehigh Valley, make it the logical location for broadcast stations to begin setting up shop.

As I rode home that July evening, a drive out the Schuylkill Expressway and over the Ben Franklin Bridge into South Jersey that I’ve made numerous times, I thought about the placement of the Philadelphia FMs. 

Much of the four southern New Jersey counties within the Nielsen radio market of Philadelphia are line-of-sight to the towers, even being 10 miles northwest of the river in Roxborough. 

For millions of listeners and viewers today, those signals from the farm are indeed at the perfect spot. 

Postscript

The original tower at Roxborough, dating from the time after TV Channel 6 moved from the Widener Building, is still used today by iHeartMedia’s 98.9 WUSL(FM) and 102.1 WIOQ(FM). WUSL and WIOQ share a combined, side-mounted antenna, a 6-bay Shively 6814-6D antenna, according to Mike Fitzpatrick’s NECRAT website.

Channel 6 itself broadcasts on the 1957 tower Annenberg had constructed, from a circularly-polarized Dielectric antenna. 

Their first digital antenna, which transmitted on UHF Channel 64, was mounted to the 2002 KYW-TV tower. But the channel was recovered by the FCC for resale in 2008, so WPVI moved back to Channel 6.

WPVI built a new transmitter facility at the base of the 1957 tower two years ago.

WPPX(TV) also broadcasts here, as well as a combined master auxiliary antenna for KYW(TV) and WPSG(TV). 

American Tower’s Paoli Ave. 1,090-foot-tall “Gross” tower is home to:

• 88.5 WXPN(FM) (using a 5-bay ERI antenna at the top)
• 92.5 WXTU(FM) (using a Katherin-Scala panel directional antenna)
• 95.7 WBEN(FM)
• 101.1 WBEB(FM)
• 102.9 WMGK(FM)
• TV: WPSJ(CD), WLPH(CD)
• Auxiliaries: 90.1 WRTI(FM), 97.5 WPEN(FM), WXTU, WTDY, WBEB, and WMGK

American Tower’s Candelabra, constructed in 2002 during the digital TV transition, is home to:

• 90.1 WRTI(FM)’s two-bay panel (top center)
• A five-station master FM panel for: 94.1 WIP(FM), 96.5 WTDY(FM), 98.1 WOGL(FM) and 103.9 WPHI(FM).
• Auxiliaries: WXTU (on the five-station master panel), and WOGL (three-bay).
• TV: WDPN(TV) Channel 2, WCAU(TV), WPHA(CD), WPHY(CD), WFPA(CD), W25FG(D), WDUM(LD), WELL(CD), WTVE(TV) and WWSI(TV).

The Banks Tower, approximately 1,090 feet high and also owned by American Tower, is home to:

• 90.9 WHYY(FM) (2-bay panel)
• 104.5 WRFF(FM) (2-bay antenna)
• 105.3 WDAS(FM) (2-bay panel)
• TV: WHYY(TV), WPHL(TV), WMCN(TV) and WUVP(DT).
• Auxiliaries: WHYY, WIP, WBEN and WMGK.

KYW(TV)’s tower, which went up in 2002 is home to WPHI(FM). According to Mike Fitzpatrick’s NECRAT, at 1,270 feet, it’s the tallest tower in all of Pennsylvania.

• WPHI’s 7-faced ERI panel directional antenna (just below)
• TV: WPVI Channel 6’s panel (at the top), Channel 3, WPSG(TV) and WPPX(TV)

Only Fox’s WTXF(TV) maintains a standalone broadcast site, using an 1,120-foot tower.  

WRNB continues to maintain an auxiliary site at its former home in Newtown Square, Delaware County.

The only band we’ve not mentioned in this story is AM, but 1540 WNWR(AM) maintained a three-tower array on the 7300 block of Ridge Ave. up until 2017. Its Collins 20V-2 auxiliary transmitter is pictured here, which Humphrey said was offered to him for conversion to the 80-meter amateur radio band.

WNWR now operates from the WHAT(AM) tower site along Conshohocken Ave. in the Wynnefield Heights section of the city.

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