Abstract

"“New York is a Ghost Town”: Broadcast Reception, the Urban Crisis, and the Rise of Cable TV"

Richard Popp, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (popp@uwm.edu)

In the mid-1960s, New York earned the sobriquet “Fun City” – a jab at what was widely perceived to be the city’s deteriorating quality of life. In the same years, New York became the first major US city to issue franchises for the development of cable television. The timing was not coincidental. Like mass transit, trash service, and the electrical grid, broadcast television was an infrastructural system thought to be nearing a state of crisis. For years, many New Yorkers had already had to put up with the “ghosts,” or doubled images caused by broadcast signals bouncing their way through the cityscape, that left stations anywhere from irritatingly blurry to completely unwatchable. The diffusion of color TV, even more prone to multipath interference, and a thicket of new office buildings, constructed in hopes of halting Manhattan’s corporate exodus, were expected to make matters all the worse. For New York’s broadcasters, most menacing of all was the Port Authority’s plans to build a pair of 110-story towers in lower Manhattan that once completed, they feared, would cast a “cone of interference” across much of the region. Cable television, it seemed to many onlookers, was the ideal solution. Not only could it make the skyline a non-issue, but also offered a chance to redeem the much-derided medium by adding a broader array of content and two-way interaction. For New York’s cable franchisees, Sterling Manhattan and TelePrompTer, the barren landscapes of “Fun City” and TV’s “vast wasteland” made for fertile ground. Drawing on the records of Sterling Manhattan, HBO, and New York’s cable-TV task force, this paper explores how perceptions of urban and televisual decay were capitalized on by a range of actors who built a new system of “pay-TV” and in the process laid the groundwork for today’s subscription-driven entertainment business.