Downtown Magazine Fall 2018 Issue

then
now
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF BERENICE ABBOTT / NYPL COLLECTION & KEN LUND
THEN AND NOW
A vastly different
area today,
Cortlandt Street
was once the hub
of electronic
industry in New
York City.
Absent anti-noise regulations at the time, they would
compete to lure clientele by blasting everything from
opera to big band to step-right-ups from loudspeakers
above their doorways, making for a motley cacophony
along Cortlandt Street.
Above all the commotion, the whimsical Cortlandt
Street “El” station stood stoic watch over the carnivalesque
scene beneath it like a “Bavarian ski lodge above
the street [that] helped give the place
the feel of an enclosed bazaar,”
as James Glanz and Eric Lipton
described it in their fascinating history
of the World Trade Center, City in
the Sky.
Harry Schneck was the first to
set up shop on Cortlandt, when he
opened City Radio in 1921. At the time,
the medium was still a novelty. As
the shops proliferated, “all of the nuts
came out of the woodwork.” Within a
few years, Radio Row was home to the
largest concentration of electronics
stores in the world, employing some
30,000 workers.
Saturday was the big day. Men from all five boroughs
and beyond would descend on Cortlandt in multitudes,
often with sons and occasionally daughter in tow. “On
Saturday afternoons it is well nigh impassable,” wrote
Hertzberg, “as radio men from the entire metropolitan
district come down to do their weekly buying.”
But it wasn’t just buying and selling, hustling and
haggling. It was terra simpatico, a makerspace for the
exchange of ideas among fellow radiophiles: How to
replace a broken tube, fine-tune a transmitter, build a
ham radio station.
The onset of World War II caused a temporary
slump in business, but Radio Row rebounded with
“TO INVENT,
you need a good
imagination…
and a pile of
junk.”
— Thomas Edison
the arrival of frequency modulation radio and later,
color television, peaking in the 1950s. Despite the
turnaround, its days would be numbered.
On March 27, 1962, the governors of New York
and New Jersey announced plans for a “World
Trade Center” smack-dab on top of Radio Row and
its surrounding warren. Shop owners closed ranks,
led by the inimitable Oscar Nadel of Oscar’s Radio,
sued the Port Authority, and took to
the streets.
In one of the more memorable
protests, a mock funeral procession,
Nadel was carried up and down
Cortlandt Street in a makeshift coffin,
flanked by supporters brandishing
placards with slogans like “Don’t Let the
P.A. Kill Mr. Small Businessman!” while
giving interviews to reporters.
The case wound its way up the
courts, but the “small businessman”
was no match for the monolithic Port
Authority and the powers behind it.
Shop owners were offered a scant
$3,000 to move. Some did, others simply folded.
No trace of Radio Row exists today. Bill Schneck
took his dad down to the site shortly after it was
bulldozed in March 1966. Harry ambled out of the
car and gazed down what had once been “a way
of life.”
Bill worried the encounter could be bad for
Harry’s health. Instead, Bill recalled on Radio
Diaries, Harry “took it in stride. Everything changes.
Neighborhoods come and go. So, back we went to
the car, and off we went.” Few of Harry’s peers fared
so well. “Oscar Nadel died a broken man,” another
former shop owner told Downtown Express in 2002.
“There were a lot of broken men.” DT
DOWNTOWNNYC AUTUMN 2017 43