A battle is brewing for the airwaves over Manhattan.
The owners of One World Trade Center are planning to install a broadcast antenna in the 1776-foot building’s spire in a bid to lure some of the more than two dozen television and radio stations currently broadcasting from the Empire State Building.
The move—reviving an earlier broadcast plan that was dropped out of financial concerns—would inject some competition into the skies for the Empire State Building, which since the collapse of the original World Trade Center towers in 2001 has been the go-to broadcast site in the city.
“Our expectations would be to become the premiere broadcast facility in New York City,” said Thomas Bow, senior vice president at the Durst Organization, the development firm that controls One World Trade in a partnership with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The building, currently under construction, is slated for completion at the end of 2013.
via Eliot Brown, “WTC Tower Seeks Radio, TV Signals” Wall Street Journal (March 6, 2012).