Radio Row is Dead but Long Live J&R

Once upon a time the radio was king. The place where many people bough radios was in an area in lower Manhattan. It was known as Radio Row. It wasn’t a street. It was many streets. I remember a few small shops around Cortland Street in the 1970’s. That was the tail end of Radio Row, which faded by the early 1980’s. Radio Row is one of the legends of lower Manhattan from its dramatic rise to its dramatic fall.

J&R opened on Park Row nearly 40 years ago. Its claim to fame was combining two consumer niches. It sold records as well as the stereo components and systems with which to play them. This was a very unique level of marketing in the 1970’s. At the time, there were many record stores (i.e. Sam Goody and Record Hut) and stereo component stores (i.e. Lafayette, Leonard Radio, and Harvey Electronics). No other store offered both a comprehensive record collection and a worthy selection of stereo equipment. Only one department store came close. That was EJ Korvettes on 47th Street. Downtown was J&R’s territory. The few radio stores on Cortland tried to sell stereos alone but went out of business or moved uptown.

Radio Row started in the 1920’s. City Radio opened on Cortlandt St. in 1921. Over the next few decades, hundreds of stores popped up. Metro Radio, Leotone Radio, The Radio Man, and Cantor the Cabinet King were just a few store names that were part of the Radio Row district. The area in lower Manhattan became a bazaar of radio tubes, knobs, HiFi equipment and antenna kits. It extended along one block of Cortland Street, down Liberty Street, Dey Street, toward Greenwich Streets. It was the largest collection of radio and electronics stores in the world. Radio Row had been the hub of the electronics industry in New York since the 1920s. The small shops had peaks and valleys over the years. Radio Row was not a neat and pretty sight. Block upon block over 300 street level stores, with over three times as many enterprises in the floors above them were jammed into 20- to 25-foot storefronts, up and down streets such as Albany, Carlisle, Greenwich and Liberty. Their shelves and floor spaces were packed with vacuum tubes, condensers, transistors and other high-tech bric-a-brac for ham radio enthusiasts and do-it-yourselfers. It was, as the New York Times called it in 1950, “a paradise for electronic tinkerers.” Storefront windows were crammed with goods from top to bottom. Every product bore a card that listed its name, serial number, manufacturer and price. Some even sold radios. This was the first major retail district in western part of the downtown Manhattan area.

In the early 1900’s, southwest Manhattan was a congested, dirty, crime-ridden area filled with saloons. One of the reasons for this had to do with the railroad industry. There was no way for trains to cross the Hudson River. People had to take ferries to Manhattan after trains stopped in Newark and Hoboken.

That all changed in 1908. That’s when the Hudson train line, in New Jersey, completed a pair of subterranean tunnels that finally connected Jersey to Manhattan. On the approximate site of the World Trade Center, the H&M building rose over the Hudson and Manhattan train tunnels. The twin towers were 22 floors each. At its front on Church Street was the elevated 6th Avenue train line. At their rear, the 9th Avenue elevated train. Both train lines were built in the late 19th Century.

Many of the stores that comprised Radio Row surrounded the borders of the H&M building. Because of the two train lines and remaining ferry terminals, Radio Row was easy to get to. Their claim to fame was radio parts over actual radios. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, NBC and RCA dominated the Radio industry. Those two companies held most of the patents for broadcast radios. Other manufacturers that wanted to build radios had to pay royalties to RCA and NBC. Building your own radio from parts was a way of saving money.

Most of Radio Row survived past the 1929 Depression. The 1930’s showed peak sales as radios grew in popularity. In 1940, the elevated train lines were no longer running. In 1941, many of the radio parts were needed by the USA as they entered the war. Business slumped. The 1950’s brought another peak in business as stores added televisions and HiFi equipment to their list of wares.

Rockefeller began discussing an idea in 1958 about building a world trade center. His proposed site was near the Fulton Fish Market, near the seaport. In the 1950’s, H&M declared bankruptcy and politicians began looking at the H&M building site as a possible location. Plans for the use of eminent domain to remove both the shops and streets bound by Vesey, Church, Liberty, Greenwich, Fulton, and Cortland streets started in 1961 when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was deciding between the east side of lower Manhattan or the west side near the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad terminals. The decision was the west side.

Most of the building where Radio Row stores were located became condemned. The grand H&M building was slated for demolition. The Port Authority renamed the H&M tunnels as the PATH. Within a few years, construction began on the World Trade Center. Only the PATH survived.

Most of Radio Row survivors found shops on Cortland Street. Another decade would pass before all remnants of Radio Row were gone.

On Park Row, J&R survived the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. With strong real estate holdings on Park Row, J&R is destined to continue.

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