WBAI

• 1. Introduction

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  WBAI, broadcasting at 99.5 FM in New York City, was once called "an anarchist's circus" by a New York Times Magazine piece. That description was not entirely unkind. The station's staff once seized their own studios, located at the time in a deconsecrated church, along with the transmitter at the Empire State Building, in protest against a station manager's proposed changes. A different station manager had already been jailed for an act of protest. This was not a station that shied from conflict. What drew so many artists, poets, activists, and agitators to a small non-commercial radio station in New York? And how did an institution that helped launch Democracy Now! and broadcast the first concert of Patti Smith eventually find itself $2 million in debt to the very program it had created?

• 2. From WABF to Pacifica

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  The signal now known as WBAI started life in 1941 as W75NY, an eastern station broadcasting at 47.5 MHz, operated by Metropolitan Television, Inc. It moved to the 99.5 frequency in 1947 and, after two years off the air, was reborn in 1955 as WBAI, the new call letters drawn from the initials of its then-owners, Broadcast Associates, Inc. Philanthropist Louis Schweitzer purchased the station and donated it to the Pacifica Foundation in 1960. With that transfer, a commercial enterprise became non-commercial and listener-supported. The Pacifica Foundation had been founded on a philosophy of community and independent broadcasting, and WBAI would prove to be its most volatile, most creative, and most contentious outpost.

• 3. Counterculture in the Air

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  Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" was first broadcast on WBAI, played on Bob Fass's freeform program Radio Unnameable. That program, in the station's own account, helped create and define the possibilities of freeform radio as a form. Through the 1960s, the station's signal reached nearly 70 miles beyond New York City, giving its programming a reach that extended well past its license area. WBAI hosted anti-Vietnam War activists, feminist voices, and live coverage of purported bra-burning demonstrations. It refused to stop airing Janis Ian's song "Society's Child", about interracial relationships, despite pressure to do so. The station covered the 1968 seizure of the Columbia University campus live and without interruption. Its 1964 political conventions coverage was delivered not by journalists but satirically, with performers including Elaine May, Julie Harris, and members of The Second City improvisational group. Under a succession of Music Directors including John Corigliano, Ann McMillan, and Eric Salzman, the station aired an annual 23-hour nonstop presentation of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle as recorded at the Bayreuth Festival the year before.

• 4. The War and Peace Broadcast

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  In 1970, producers Kathy Dobkin, Milton Hoffman, and Francie Camper organized what Newsweek called "one of the more mind-blowing 'firsts' in the history of the media." WBAI undertook an unprecedented four-day, round-the-clock reading of Tolstoy's War and Peace, cover to cover, with more than 200 readers drawn from a wide field of international figures. The complete recording filled more than 200 audio tapes and became the first Pacifica program selected for the permanent collection of the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City. Three years later, in 1973, the station aired comedian George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television monologue without censoring it. That broadcast led directly to a landmark Supreme Court case, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, decided in 1978 by a 5-to-4 margin, which defined the scope of the federal government's authority over broadcast material deemed indecent.

• 5. Arts Programming Under Ruas

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  In 1974, program director Marnie Mueller asked Charles Ruas to take over arts programming at the station. Under Ruas, WBAI became a platform for New York's avant-garde across theater, music, performance, and poetry. When Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's downtown operas A Letter for Queen Victoria and Einstein on the Beach opened at the Metropolitan Opera, WBAI was in the rehearsal rooms taping excerpts for broadcast. Ruas inaugurated a year-long reading series devoted to Marguerite Young's novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, with performances scored by Rob Wynne using a collage of sound, music, and opera. Participants included Anais Nin, Marian Seldes, and Earle Hyman. When William Burroughs returned from Tangier to the United States, Ruas invited him to present a four-part retrospective of his own works, beginning with Junkie; The Yage Letters was read by Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg together. Ruas also inaugurated the Audio Experimental Theater series, bringing artists including John Cage, Vito Acconci, Meredith Monk, and Richard Foreman to the airwaves. Ira Weitzman, who took over the Saturday night Free Music Store program, produced what he described as Patti Smith's first concert. These programs were disseminated nationally through the Pacifica Network.

• 6. Tax Disputes and the Christmas Coup

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  In March 1977, New York City's Tax Commission denied WBAI the educational tax exemption the station had assumed it held. The resulting back taxes forced the sale of the deconsecrated church building on the Upper East Side that WBAI had called home for years. The station relocated to the 19th floor of an office building at 505 Eighth Avenue, the former home of Caedmon Records. In 1980, Samori Marksman, a Caribbean immigrant and Marxist activist, became program director and shifted the station's focus toward international issues and the promotion of people of color on staff. Marksman founded Democracy Now! in 1996, the program later helmed by Amy Goodman, who had begun her career at the station under an earlier program director. Marksman's sudden death from a massive heart attack on the 23rd of March 1999 drew more than 3,000 people to his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. His death opened a fracture that had been suppressed during his tenure. In December 2000, a faction led by Utrice Leid, who had expected to succeed Marksman, padlocked the station and seized the airwaves in what became known as the "Christmas Coup." General manager Valerie Van Isler and others were fired immediately. The on-air and off-air conflict that followed lasted for several years.

• 7. Financial Crisis and Shutdown

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  Hurricane Sandy struck WBAI's offices in late 2012, flooding the Manhattan building to the second floor, trapping seven staffers inside, and disabling telephone systems. The disaster coincided with a fundraising period, leaving the station unable to raise sufficient funds. In 2013, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting suspended payments to WBAI over accounting irregularities. By August of that year, Pacifica management announced layoffs of about two-thirds of the staff: 19 of 29 employees, including the entire news department. At that point the station owed $2 million in broadcast fees to Democracy Now! alone, while cash on hand was just $23,000. The California State Attorney General opened a formal investigation into the Pacifica Foundation on the 17th of December 2014 over alleged financial irregularities and bylaw violations. A court judgment in 2017 awarded Empire State Realty Trust $1.8 million plus attorney's fees for unpaid lease obligations, with an additional $600,000 for the period through the ruling date. A settlement reached on the 6th of April 2018 released WBAI from those obligations; a listener bailout loan from sister station KPFK covered the remaining fees. The station began broadcasting from its current location at 4 Times Square on the 31st of May 2018. On the 7th of October 2019, the Pacifica Foundation announced it was shutting down WBAI's local operations, leaving only two workers on site. Staff filed suit within hours. A judge ordered operations restored, but the studio had already been dismantled before the injunction took effect. Local programming resumed on the 7th of November 2019. In April 2024, the station announced it had again fallen into arrears on tower rental, with $150,000 owed to the building at 4 Times Square, and that its general manager warned any forced removal would mean "the end of WBAI" - words the general manager insisted were "not hyperbole."