Electronics on Sale. Cheap!

For about 40 years, 1926-’66, electrical discount shops gave New York’s narrow, teeming Courtlandt Street its nickname, Radio Row. Every sizable American city had its own Radio Row somewhere downtown, stores where you could buy everything from console radios to vacuum tubes on sale. New York City’s was the largest and most bustling one, filled with small retailers in desperate competition to make the month’s rent. A tough way to make a living, but a great place to pick up a bargain.

When WWII ended, two developments brought renewed life to Radio Row. The first was television, which barely got started before the war. Suddenly, every bar in the city wanted a TV set, for baseball, boxing and wrestling, and every radio dealer was selling them. The best prices were on Courtlandt Street. The second new specialty was military electronics, new and used, released to the public as war surplus. Plenty of magazine articles detailed how to turn Army and Navy gear into ham radio stations, even TV stations. Radio Row was paradise for frugal experimenters, inventors, and students. Many science fair projects began with Uncle Sam’s discards, including a couple of mine.

Picture the brick tenements and fire escapes of The Bronx, 1948. Suppose you’re a Navy veteran who saved his discharge pay and wants a TV. You can go locally to Sachs or Davega’s furniture store and buy a set for $240, delivered. Or for a nickel ride downtown to Radio Row, buy it for $189.95, take a cab home for $11, and pay a pair of neighborhood kids $1 each to carry it up three flights of stairs.

In mid-century New York, the second language of retail was Yiddish. Remember the robot garment salesmen in Sleeper? The old guys really talked like that. To a greater degree than today, classic industrial-age cities had neighborhood specialties where similar businesses clustered to reach the public. Manhattan had its diamond district centered on 47th Street. Cameras were sold and repaired on or near 34^th Street. Typewriters and toys were wholesaled on 23^rd Street. It was natural that lower Manhattan would have its own shopping district for what would become consumer electronics. It wasn’t just an NYC phenomenon; London, Cologne, Hong Kong and Tokyo had their own, and so did many other cities.

Courtlandt Street was already known to be on borrowed time when I made my first visits during my high school’s Easter break when I was fifteen. Another kid clued me in, and I’m grateful to have seen, even savored, the legendary atmosphere of the past.

Radio Row was, relatively speaking, a mere brief-lived newcomer to Gotham. Courtlandt Street was once the home of rows of ship chandlers’ shops, and a few managed to hang on: places where you could buy rope, pulleys, and canned provisions.

Soon, every last bit of Radio Row was going to have to move, and fast; the stores had already received eviction notices, as demolition and excavation of the entire extended neighborhood to construct the twin towers of the World Trade Center were imminent. In retrospect, one vanishing world of old New York was about to make way for a different, tragically vanished world of twentieth-century New York.

Business on Courtlandt Street in April 1967 was still as brisk as ever, and a unique and soon-to-be forgotten subculture was still relentlessly focused on face-to-face sales. Bushel baskets of used and new parts spilled out onto the sidewalk, of Mil-Spec headphones, klystron tubes, Teletype™ keyboards, metal cylinder capacitors, polarized glass filters, JAN (joint Army-Navy) servo motors, gyroscopes, all at pennies on the dollar. “Pick ‘em up, gentlemen, pick ‘em up,” a barker ceaselessly exhorted from the store’s doorway.

Some snobs used to insult military hardware as “built by the lowest bidder,” but the fascinating bits and pieces we could buy and disassemble were impressively made, inside and out, with anti-corrosive coatings, flawless soldering, and robust buttons and dials. For $2 I bought a range-finding aux control of some type. It had flat black surfaces, cryptic labels, and the highest quality toggle switches I’d ever seen. It had two Veeder-Root odometer-style counters and a side dial adjuster controlled by Vernier precision concentric-within-concentric gearing. Whatever it was, it probably cost USAF a thousand bucks in 1955; a dozen years later, it was mine, for the cost of a couple of copies of Mad magazine.

By the fall of 1967, about half of Radio Row moved to Canal Street, a much wider, busier street half a mile north. I was glad to see the re-emergence of many of the “junk box” second-hand shops. The other pioneers signed off for good. By then, Manhattan’s original Radio Row was gone forever, replaced by a seven-story-deep, quarter-mile-wide hole in the ground that would be filled at the dawn of the seventies.

There was a steady flow of new electronic surplus and all sorts of technical discards. TV stations everywhere had abandoned black and white by then. Everything down to the thick camera cables found its way to Canal Street. Computer parts were increasingly prominent, and their machine-made printed circuit boards were top quality. In one critical way, though, they were far too good for my liking: the diodes, resistors, and capacitors were efficiently trimmed so tightly, it was no longer useful to clip them off the board. Basically, you couldn’t re-use them. For a generation of parts scavengers, game over. The new integrated circuits were marvels, though.

Canal Street runs through Chinatown. The old world faded, soon to be replaced by hustling discounters who spoke Chinese and Hindi. The early 80s boom in consumer electronics once again drew people downtown in search of bargain appliances—color TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens, and early home computers. Some of the anonymous shoving mob of little guy retailers started running ads on local TV, and some became momentarily famous citywide. In New York, it was Crazy Eddie, whose prices were insane, Uncle Steve, and “Jerry,” the hard-hatted spokesman for JGE. “Izzat the story, Jerry?” “Yep, that’s the stor-rry!” he’d yell. Later, Jerry opened a disco on Long Island.

That was two generations ago. The old discounter’s motto, “Stack ‘em deep and sell ‘em cheap” went to its logical extreme with big box stores, which could stack ‘em deeper than any fifties retailer’s wildest dreams. Eventually, the internet’s retailing abilities would sound the death knell for most direct-to-consumer electronic parts.

I remember Fry’s, once a California mainstay, gigantic supermarkets of consumer electronics, computers, DVDs, wiring, security, and phone equipment -- the biggest “toy stores” in town. When our kids were little and we were furnishing our home, I spent a lot of time and money there. With a smile, I might add. We kept going back, buying color printers for school projects, video games on birthdays, and unusual movies that few other stores had. The prices were great, and every day their cartoon spokes-character “Charlie Chip” pointed out oddball tech bargains on the back page of the sports section of the Los Angeles Times. Fry’s parking lot was so jammed they had to rent parking space along disused freight tracks. I remember it vividly.

But a memory is all it is. I recall the last time I was there, and in the distorted perspective of memory, it was part of the stricken look of the Covid Era: few shoppers, a vacant parking lot, aisles of nearly-empty shelves that evoked the twilight of the USSR. But this was three months before Covid “became a thing” (locally, at least). By the end of 2019, Fry’s was gone.

There’s a welcome place in this world for software developers, who can think and grow on successive generations of machines that entrepreneurial people will contrive to provide for them. What about future generations of hardware developers? Will there be anything like the five-and-dime, sometimes ramshackle path that created minor miracles on plywood work benches in seventies garages? For everyone’s sake, there better be.