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I might have visited Radio Row for the first time in the spring of 1961. My father took me along with him on one of his frequent excursions there to find yet another replacement tube for our RCA television set. This set was (to me, a 7-year old) a colossus of electronic bewilderment, encased within mahogany, standing tall and imposingly in our living room like the Monolith of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The picture would take an aggravating eternity (maybe longer) to come on, if it came on at all, and its electronic appetite would gobble-up tubes like a sponge. However, the most terrible thing about this monstrosity was its uncanny ability to conk-out during my favorite shows; “Mr.Ed” in particular. Right in the middle of “Hello. My name is…” silence; no sound, no picture, and no Mr. Ed.

A tube on the outer edge of this television’s apparent jungle of tubes was at once the usual culprit and easiest to replace without calling a repairman. Even my father could replace it without risking the chance of having the set explode; hence, the visits to Radio Row. If I had thought that our set had a lot of tubes, I hadn’t seen anything yet.

Along twisting and winding streets named Albany, Greenwich, Carlisle and Liberty, were piled rows of over 300 street level stores above which tottered numerous related businesses, their shelves virtual mountains stacked with vacuum tubes, transistors, condensers, and every other conceivable electronic accessory known and unknown to human civilization. This was the Garden of Eden for every ham radio enthusiast, do-it-yourselfer and maniac there ever was or ever could be, whose complexity made our formidable TV back home look like a bread box.

“EVERYTHING IN TELEVISION AND RADIO,” “IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, IT DOESN’T EXIST,” proudly proclaimed scattered signs throughout Radio Row’s tangled maze of modern and moldering marvels, stuffed with gadgets, gizmos and other electrifying curiosities. When the area haphazardly sprung-up in the 1920s, it dealt almost exclusively with radio tubes; in the post-war years it diversified to include television sets, WWII era electronic surplus, stereos, shortwave radios, all neatly marked with a unique RADIO ROW tag.

We entered what could be best described as a “crack in the wall” between two cluttered vendors’ tables, into an impossibly crammed and incredibly precise store. A small elderly man, who easily remembered the days before radio itself, greeted us. My father giving him the model/ serial numbers of the required tubes, he quickly disappeared into his inscrutable sanctum and just as quickly reappeared with those glass bubbles; there was magic in those days…or so it seemed.

When we arrived home, I watched my father insert the tubes into their respective slots within the Monolith; the power turned on, the tubes slowly glowed one, two, then five, six…and the picture tube would illuminate and sound the action on the screen. This is how “Mr. Ed,” “The Abbott and Costello Show,” “The Honeymooners” and the entire host of my favorite shows arrived in my home. All thanks to that dilapidated magic place called Radio Row which I’d thought would last forever. As I watched Mr. Ed that week, I think I heard my parents talking about Radio Row being replaced by a skyscraper complex, towering higher than the Empire State Building (which, we deemed, was impossible). But that was in the future…in my child’s world of vacuum tubes and condensers, today was the future. In the later 60s, I would remember Radio Row, as I watched two strange-looking columns rising in Lower Manhattan, against the blare of my transistor radio and a gasoline station selling gasoline at 40 cents a gallon outside the corner of my eye…thinking it would last forever, in days when forever used to be a long time.