The World-Famous Tower Site Calendar 2007

January 12, 2007

Demolition of the WOR Towers, Lyndhurst, N.J.

Want to get a whole bunch of engineers in one place - with lots of TV cameras and a couple of TV helicopters, too?

Here's how you do it: drop three 690-foot towers within eyesight of the New York skyline.

It took two tries, as we've chronicled in NERW - but on a sunny Thursday morning, with all the needed permits in place and a line of cameras and tripods poised at the new WOR site half a mile away in East Rutherford, the towers that served WOR from 1967 until late 2006 finally came tumbling down into the Meadowlands.

Right on schedule at 11:01 AM on January 11, tower crews cut one set of guy wires on each of the two westernmost towers at the old WOR site, and in the space of just 20 seconds or so, those two towers wobbled and crumpled and collapsed on themselves.

About eight minutes later, once the tower crews had made their way to the guys for the easternmost tower, it too bowed down and disappeared from view.

And about half an hour later, many of the engineers who watched the towers fall were over at the old site, climbing over the downed tower sections (many of which fell remarkably cleanly), checking out the remains of the tower bases, picking up pieces of shattered base insulator as souvenirs, and poking around the mostly-empty shell of the transmitter building, where just the old dummy load, phasor cabinet and some empty racks remained as evidence of four decades of broadcasting.

We'll have more pictures from the big event on Monday, as part of our comprehensive coverage on NorthEast Radio Watch - and some video, too!

Thanks - and congratulations - to WOR's Tom Ray for our ongoing visits to his sites, new and old

The Tower Site Calendar 2007 is here! They're going to sell out, just like 2006 did - order today at the Fybush.com Store!