Why New York Hated The Twin Towers: Radio Row Documentary

The Twin Towers at the World Trade Center did not rise on empty ground. For more than forty years before the towers went up, the site was home to Radio Row, a dense, twelve block neighborhood of electronics shops, tinkerers, and a few hundred families who lived above the stores in Manhattan, New York City. In July of nineteen sixty two, one shop owner climbed into a wooden coffin on Cortlandt Street and staged his own funeral to save it. It did not work, and the reason it could never have worked is stranger than the fight itself. This documentary follows the whole arc: Harry Shneck opening a single radio parts store on Cortlandt Street in nineteen twenty one, the block growing into Radio Row, a national electronics market doing an estimated ten percent of the country's radio and television sales out of a few dozen storefronts, the Saturday crowds, the loudspeakers, and the tinkerers building their own receivers from war surplus parts. It follows the negotiation, four years before the bulldozers arrived, in which a bank chairman's civic committee, a stalled New Jersey governor, and his successor traded a bankrupt commuter railroad for a rebuilt PATH line, and moved the World Trade Center's planned site directly on top of the neighborhood almost by accident. It follows Oscar Nadel's four year legal fight against the Port of New York Authority, the buyout offers of three thousand dollars per business, the demolition that began in March of nineteen sixty six, and Jean Brown, a young typist who photographed the wrecking crews from her own apartment window until her own eviction notice arrived. Today, One World Trade Center and the National September Eleventh Memorial and Museum stand on the same ground, commemorating a later, separate tragedy with the seriousness it deserves. What they do not commemorate is Radio Row. No plaque at the site names Cortlandt Street, Oscar Nadel, or the parts shop that started it all. This film is about the neighborhood that was already gone thirty five years before September eleventh, two thousand one, told on its own terms. Chapters: 0:00 The Funeral for a Neighborhood 2:10 How Radio Row Was Built 5:53 Life on Radio Row 9:22 The Deal That Moved the World Trade Center 14:40 Radio Row Fights Back 19:00 The Backlash and Demolition 23:20 What Survived Radio Row Sources for this episode include the NYC Municipal Archives, the New York Public Library's Berenice Abbott photograph collection, period New York Times coverage, the Courtesy Sandwich Shop v. Port of New York Authority court record, NPR's Sonic Memorial Project, and the historical research of the Downtown Alliance and the Tribeca Trib into Radio Row. 📘 Buy Vanished America Ebook: https://www.allansabandonedamerica.co... 📕 Get The Field Guide Now: https://www.allansabandonedamerica.co... ▶️ Help me to 1000 Subs:    / @allansabandonedamerica   About This Channel: Allan's Abandoned America tells the stories of abandoned ghost towns, forgotten tourist resorts, and declining infrastructure across the United States. Each video investigates who built these places, who profited, and who was left behind. WATCH Next: The Neighborhood Buried Under Dodger Stadium: Chavez Ravine Documentary:    • The Neighborhood Buried Under Dodger Stadi...   Full Playlist: Abandoned Places in America:    • Abandoned Places in America   READ the full written report at allansabandonedamerica.com/places/radio-row-manhattan DISCLAIMER This video is for educational and documentary purposes. Visit any locations mentioned at your own risk. Some visual sequences in this video are dramatic re-enactments created for illustrative purposes and do not depict real footage.