[BC] Class "D" AM Towers

[Scott Fybush]

Dave Hultsman wrote:

> Thanks for the response, my mind has cobwebs.  I believe the WYSL
> studios were in the Statler-Holton and I recall the name Larkin
> Building where the AM was on top.  Jim Moran was the CE there at the
> time.  I remember when they built the new tower for the FM and the
> AM.  

The history is rather interesting here:

WYSL was indeed the McLendon station in Buffalo, and it ended up as an 
amalgamation of two stations. When McLendon came into Buffalo in the 
late fifties, he bought a daytimer on 1080 that was then licensed to 
Kenmore, where it was known as WINE and then WXRA. McLendon changed the 
calls to WYSL and installed the KABL beautiful-music format from San 
Francisco.

Not long into his Buffalo run, a full-time station, WBNY on 1400, became 
available and McLendon quickly unloaded the daytimer on 1080 (it became 
WUFO) and flipped WBNY to WYSL on 1400. The FM on 103.3 that had been 
associated with 1080 stayed in McLendon's hands and eventually became 
WPHD (or "WPhD," as they ALWAYS spelled it.)

The 1400 transmitter was indeed atop the Larkin Building just east of 
downtown Buffalo, and the 103.3 ended up there too until 1978, when the 
present 1400/103.3 facility was built on Grider Street in what Mark 
correctly identifies as an unsavory part of town overlooking the NY 
33/NY 198 interchange.

But the Larkin facility wasn't built for 1400 - it was built in 1936 for 
WEBR, which was then a class IV station on 1310. WEBR shifted to 1340 in 
1941, of course, and then moved down the dial and away from the Larkin 
Building when it became a DA-1 signal on 970 a decade or so later from a 
five-tower site on Cloverbank Road in Hamburg, south of Buffalo.

I'm not sure how long the Larkin site was empty before WBNY moved there.

One of the Larkin towers still stands, and the building itself has been 
very nicely renovated as office space.

http://www.larkindg.com/about.html

(For architecture buffs, this is the "Larkin Warehouse Building," a 
separate and far less important building than Frank Lloyd Wright's 
Larkin Administration Building a block away, which was tragically 
demolished in a fit of urban renewal.)

s