‘RF Acres’ — A Towering Achievement
The iconic Blaw-Knox radio tower that has long powered iHeartMedia News-Talk WLW-AM/Cincinnati will soon be the centerpiece of a proposed retail and business park development. No, seriously. Longtime Cincinnati media journalist John Kiesewetter, who now works for Cincinnati Public Radio outlet WVXU-FM reports the “Tower Park” planned unit development along Mason’s booming Tylersville Road corridor was approved by city council earlier this year. The 26.7-acre concept plan calls for four restaurants, five office buildings, a small retail building, a mini-warehouse, 700 parking spaces and a loop service road with a roundabout — to be situated in between the brick building that housed the station’s original one-of-a-kind 500,000-watt transmitter; the residence for WLW-AM’s chief engineer; a guard tower and a second antenna west of the transmitter building. iHeartMedia recently sold the tower property to Vertical Bridge Holdings, the nation’s largest private owner and manager of communication infrastructure.
The 831-foot diamond-shaped tower, one of only six still used today by U.S. radio stations, will remain in operation. The monstrous structure is 35-feet wide in the middle at the WLW call letters, but only 30 inches wide at the base, which rests on a ceramic insulator.
Fun facts: After WLW-AM founder Powel Crosley was granted experimental “super power” by the federal government, President Franklin D. Roosevelt activated the 500,000-watt transmitter on May 2, 1934 via remote from the White House. According to a historical marker on the site, the custom-built 500,000-watt transmitter was 54-feet wide, 13-feet tall and 7-feet deep and used 22 glass radio tubes — each 5-feet high — which were cooled by 700 gallons of distilled water per minute circulating from a nearby pond. With a signal 10 times more powerful than any other U.S. broadcaster, “The Nation’s Station” beamed programs coast to coast (and beyond) until 1939, then continued to use “super power” from midnight-2am until 1943.
Kiesewetter, who has obviously survived his fair share of Ohio winters, wisely cautions, “Some of the parking spaces and buildings are under the tensioned guy wires, cables supporting the 831-foot WLW-AM tower, which could drop icicles after a winter storm. (I bet anyone who ever parked under the WKRC-TV and WLWT-TV towers won’t park under that tower after a winter storm!”) [Photo credit: John Kiesewetter]
