History of CBS Records 30th Street Studio NYC (many pictures)

That's the old control room between Terry and Williams. Window at the bottom of the frame and the clock to the right of Terry's index finger. Drapes in the appropriate positions. For comparison:



I'm going to ping the author.

 

Definitely Chuck Sagle as mentioned upthread. I had the pleasure of interviewing him in 1999 about his work with Roy Hamilton. He passed away in 2015.

 

Doing some quick searching, it appears Chuck Sagle and Jim Foglesong both worked with Roy Hamilton, possibly even at the same time, I believe with Sagle arranging and Foglesong producing. Unfortunately, CBS didn't list producers on albums at the time.

Here's Sagle in the gatefold of the Ping Pong Percussion LP from 1961:



@MLutthans previously posted some better quality photos from that album. Do you have the Sagle photo scanned?

Assuming the photos with Hamilton are from the late '50s, that's arguably a really big change in look for Sagle.

Going back to the Hugh Downs session, I haven't found anything with Downs and Sagle, but I did find this:

Epic Pacts Hugh Downs

NEW YORK — Hugh Downs, the
Jack Paar TV Show’s announcer, has
heen signed by Epic Records, accord-
ing to an announcement last week
by Jim Fogelsong, Director of Pop-
ular Albums for the company. Plans
are underway for Downs, a versatile
folk-singer and guitarist, to cut a
record in mid March, when he and
the Paar Show return from a two-
week stand on the coast. The album
will be released in the spring.

Full text of "Cash Box"

 

Hah! Now the caption reads, "Patrick Williams conducting the trumpeter Clark Terry and other musicians at a session in New York in 1962, shortly after Mr. Williams moved there."

This thread has corrected the NYT.

 

As Luke points out, the pictures with Hamilton and the Ping Pong Percussion and other Chuck Sagle pictures are vastly different looking people.

While you are certainly in a pre-eminent position compared to the rest of us (you say you interviewed Chuck Sagle and we can't), I can't believe that that is Chuck Sagle with Hamilton and in the many other pictures we have of that guy that I think is Jim Foglesong. The only later picture I have of Foglesong (which is posted in the thread after that post you quoted) looks like the guy with Hamilton grown older. Same sweet, gentle look.

If you have pictures, please post them and I'll be happy to be corrected.

 

Nice find, thanks for posting it and for the subsequent detective work by our House Detectives who forced the Gray Lady to change that detail.

In other news, I have one session to nail down before announcing this Fall's AES Convention Historical Track.

 

Somewhere earlier in this thread, and elsewhere, too, I've tried to provide context for 30th St's central role in world cultural life by pointing out that New York City was undamaged by WWII and had benefited from an influx of European refugees, many of whom were in the musical, cultural, and intellectual elite of their native countries.

My son gave me a couple about books of New York history, which is also a hobby of mine, and I've just finished "City of Dreams", by Tyler Anbinder, which is a very comprehensive look at immigration to and through New York City from its first immigrants until today, so over 400 years.

The opening paragraph to Chapter 21, "Renaissance", says it much better than I could ever hope to, so I'm going to quote it here:

"Throughout much of the past, Rome was considered 'the capital of the world'. Others awarded that designation to Paris. Ernest Hemingway set a short story of that name in Madrid. But in the years immediately after World War II, there was near universal agreement that New York had achieved that status. The war helped Wall Street displace London as the headquarters of international finance and likewise enabled New York to overtake Paris to become the world capital of fashion and the arts. The United Nations decided in December 1946 to place its headquarters not along the Seine, the Thames, the Tiber, or the Rhine, or even on the banks of the Schuylkill (as the Times predicted a day before the decision was announced), but alongside New York's East River. Compared to the great cities of Europe, Sergeant Milton Lehman of New York observed in Stars and Stripes as he prepared to return home in 1945, 'New York is still the promised land.'"

So that's the context in which Columbia remodeled the Church into the Church recording studio.

Off-topic, but if you're looking for a book about the two subjects it covers, I really enjoyed reading this one. It highlights the facts of immigration rather than the nonsense that's being peddled these days far and wide.

1) There was no "immigration process" for the first two hundred years of New York history. Until around the time of the Revolutionary War, if you could get to America you could walk right in and do as you pleased.

2) Around the Revolutionary War, doctors started meeting immigrant ships and looking for people with contagious diseases. Those affected were sent back home, a grueling process that resulted in many deaths until the shipping companies started inspecting people before departure. Those who didn't have diseases could come right in. (The process did get more exacting in the early 20th Century, starting with ineligibility of those with low moral character and likely committers of treason and going from there.)

3) Ellis Island was built not to protect Americans from immigrants, but to protect immigrants from predatory Americans who would steal their luggage or sign them into servitude or paying exorbitant rents for lodging. The island (and its predecessor, Castle Garden in what's now Battery Park) both protected the immigrants and made it so the inspectors didn't have to track down each arriving ship.

4) Every American generation starting just after the founding of the City has complained that the current crop of immigrants is not at all like the preceding groups and is bringing the country down with its failure to assimilate, its strange religions, its clannish ways, its strange foods, and its sapping of our country's economy. Every one. And yet we are the product of those misfits.

That is a very gross summary. It's an interesting and surprising read.

Back on topic shortly.

 

On topic again:

There will be two 30th St. -related presentations at the next Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York City October 17-20.

1) I am in the process of adding content to my last talk about the history of the studio, calling it this time "Life and Death of the 30th St. Studio". I'm eliminating some stuff to give more time to add material, since it will need to be precisely 90 minutes this time. That will be Wednesday the 17th in the afternoon at the Javits Center, and you'll need to have the full pass to the Convention to get in to see it.

I wish there was another way for you to get in, and I'll ask again this year: If anyone has a place that is reasonably quiet that can hold 30 or so people and has a screen big enough to be viewed by that many folks, please let me know and I'll be thrilled to give the talk there. For reasons which I'll outline below, I won't be able to bring my little video projector, so that will have to be provided.

I get to NYC in early October and intend to pop up to Yale for a couple of isolated days to do some research into Goddard's papers, which are collected there, and will try to look through Fred's papers as well and maybe some of his travel pictures.

There is also an apparently awesome RCA company photo archive in Wilmington, Delaware, and if I can make a decent day's trip out of that (if it's not going to take the whole day to get there and back, leaving no room to be there) I'd like to go there and see what can be found. As we've seen, there was lots of RCA gear in 30th St and the other CBS studios and there should be awesome factory pics of those, and maybe even of their construction and research leading to their final forms.

If anyone wants to join me for either of those you'd be welcome.

2) Back to the Convention: On Friday night, the 19th, I'll be in the Dolby Screening Room on 6th Ave. (Avenue of the Americas) and 55th with Thomas Z. Shepard, producer of many, many classical and Broadway recordings, to do a live commentary for the D.A. Pennebaker documentary "Company", a fly-on-the-wall view of the making of the Original Cast Recording of the Stephen Sondheim musical which was filmed almost entirely in 30th St.

!!!!!!!!

To say that I was excited when Tom agreed to do this would be the understatement of the year.

The Dolby Theater was not built to have simultaneous operation of microphones and movie projection, though, so I'm going to bring a little sound system that I've used elsewhere in my work as a PA company which should fit into my carry-on, but will be the reason I can't bring the projector. I haven't yet tried to put everything in the carryon that needs to go, but I'm pretty sure it will be full and at the limits of "carry on".

For this one, I have some flexibility about who can come. There will be a $10 charge for AES members of any type, and $20 for non-members, which will go to the AES to offset expenses for the Convention in that enormously expensive city, but if you wanted to come to this you wouldn't have to register for the convention but just pay this extra charge (extra over the cost of convention registration). You will be on my guest list. Assuming there's only a few, I can almost certainly work that out and save you a seat if you absolutely PROMISE to be there and show up. This is a screening room and not a big theater, so I need everyone who says they want to come to actually be there. There's no overflow seating or standing space.

We get the room at 6pm, and I'm planning that the doors will open at 6:15, we'll start at 6:45 and be done by about 8:30, and we have to be completely out by 9.

Now you know about it. PM me if you're interested and we'll finalize as we get closer.

There are other off-topic presentations in the Historical Track, but I'll make another post later somewhere else on this forum announcing them and link to it here, as was suggested above. They are ALMOST final.

Thanks for reading all this.

 

Thread for the Historical Track Events at the October 17-20, 2018 New York City Audio Engineering Society Convention

As promised.

 

Back to the New Control Room!
Some of you know that Dan did obtain copies of microfiched blueprints from the NYC building dept, and I have been helping clean them up. But nothing about the New Control Room has shown up. Shown here are some wild half-baked conjectures on my part of the New Control Room area, based solely on what we've seen in photos. This is stuck on top of a fairly accurate plan of the lower (south) portion of the building footprint. This unmapped area south of the studio space where the New Control Room was built is about 66 feet wide and 37.75 feet deep. A little of the Old Control Room is shown at the top left and is 12 feet deep.

Any ideas or suggestions about mapping out this space?

 

Bruno Walter is part of the layout?

 

Of course! His poster is prominent in photos of the NCR, just inside the machine room area. It's one of the landmarks to identify what direction a photo of the area is.

 

This drawing is so great because for the first time we can really visualize how D and the Control room had to placed, relative to each other as well as to the tape machine room and the sidewalk wall.

As Gary mentioned, I went and bought the 3oth St building documents and permits, which cost middling three digits, and have not been eager to just give that investment away wholesale, although some documents have been shared here. The part of those documents that should show this detail does not, and simply leaves blank between the stairway wall on the left and the wall with 3 doors in it on the right, and between the studio wall on top where the New Control Room window is located and the sidewalk wall.

Gary and I talked about how big the control room would be, and I said something like 4' from rear rack to wall, 2.5' for rear rack, 5 or 6' between console and rear rack, 3-4' for console, and about 5-6' in front of the console, giving a range of 19.5'-22.5' of depth, and something like that wide, although we know roughly how far to the West (left) of the window the wall was, and roughly how far to the right was the tape machine wall. One or two pictures that were posted earlier in the thread showed that the tape machine room was not super deep West to East, so that's where that dotted line comes in in that area.

We assume double doors in the back of the control room to limit sound bleed, and perhaps assume a wall/walkway West-East next to the sidewalk wall.

We know that there was a little hallway between Studio D and the control room, and that it went back at least as far as the windows between D and the Control Room, and can probably assume that it went all the way to whatever was South of D and the Control Room.

We know that Studio D had to fit in the space between that hallway and the wall next to the stairway on the West (although some who were actually there dispute that there was a stairway in that personnel entrance/exit on the extreme West of the building).

I have pictures that I can't publicly share yet of an unknown area with comfy chairs for sleeping (Robert Coote is shown doing just that), with bold linoleum squares on the floor for high use, as well as a water fountain and possibly a pay telephone. It would make sense to me that the area to the South of the back doors of the control room could have been used for just that purpose, but I have no proof.

The Plaut pictures are notably lacking in depicting anyplace outside of the control rooms or main studio. There are a few that show other studios, and I have suspicions that a few of them are Studio D. But not much for sure, and nothing behind the Control Room.

Huge thanks to Gary for pursuing this!

 

Slightly updated dwg v3

 

keep these photos coming

 

I've looked at all of this thread the last couple of years. I'm sure people are aware of these photos (some at 30th st)...I'll post the link just in case Vintage Sessions

 

Thanks for posting this, Dale. Jim Reeves' site was probably the first one I found when starting to research 30th St., and it's really wonderful that it started out great and he has regularly improved it over the years. It's greatly different than the last time I looked at it a year and a half ago or so; he has lots of new pictures of CBS people that I'm going to add to my collection. He's a great source of information.

 

He has some nice pics from all the studios, including equipment

 

Regarding this old post and Studio D, it looks to me like the view past Igor shows a window across the hall, since it stops at about the same height at the top, where the view past the Asian woman looks like a door with a framed window, and a deadbolt lock, an maybe a rectangular push plate. I'm looking at the originals on Dan's Flickr Photostream.

 

Also see these shots of Allers et al. I will guess that the exercise vestibule is right through the control room door, so I drew single inner doors and double outer doors. I'll also guess that I see a door across the hall with a viewing window, past Allers.

 

I dunno, if the shot of Igor was taken with a slight up angle, a door would look just like that. Although, the distance from the waist-high or lower molding to the top of the door in the Asian woman picture is about 3.5 tile squares, whereas in the Igor picture it's only 2.5 tile squares, so I think you are right that it's a window.

That means there's a door and window right next to each other in D?? Why would there be a door there in what is presumably the middle of the hallway, unless it is the way to get from the D control room into the D studio?

 

Unless I missed something, we're still talking about "Studio D?" with a question mark, correct? Because there are more rooms than that to account for. Why would D have to have been in that area specifically?

Also, @GLouie, what is "D window, later removed"? Am I forgetting something? I don't recall any photos of a window there.

 

So you think the vestibule/area the guy is stretching in is off of one of the back doors of the control room?

That seems reasonable, except that the pictures of both doors show at least a short wall next to each door, walls which would be consistent with having double doors into the control room. Absent the double doors, it doesn't seem like there's a reason to have those side walls if the room doesn't extend past the door (which it doesn't) or there's closets/storage/other uses in that space (unknown, so possible).

FYI Allers is the baldish guy next to Tom Shepard, not the guy in the double breasted coat. He is Morton Da Costa, and that series of pictures are from the sessions that resulted in "To Broadway With Love", presented daily at the 1964 NY World's Fair, I think in the Texas Pavilion. I found the identities of all those people after posting the pics. Reviews of the production were tepid, but I think it probably fit in nicely at a World's Fair (based on what was at the Seattle one two years earlier).

 

There is almost no question that there was a Studio D there, since multiple people who worked there talked about working in D, including Jim Reeves in the link that Dale recently provided. Don Puluse talked about it, too, in the video interview that I did with him. D was not a big space, but it was big enough that Sly Stone could run past a microphone in order to get a Doppler effect, if that was enough to get a Doppler effect.

It had to be in that area specifically because there was nowhere else that it could have been on the main floor.

That's what Gary told me, but there are a few, at least one of which has already been posted in this thread. I'll repost the one I know of (Gary pointed it out, I can't take any credit), and then show the best one I've found.

Here's the Cassius Clay live recording, from the CD booklet:



You can just see a rectangle in the dark at the far upper right of the picture. There is a door just to its left which is partially open.

These two are undated, showing a Monk session





with Teo. Don't know who the other guys are, but the one on the railing looks like a room attendant.

The window is clearly new, there's lots of patching around it.

Here is Edward Albee, Goddard, and some unknown to me people. This one is part of the "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" sessions, and as near as I can tell that was in October 1962. The wall patching looks the same as the earlier two pics, so one would think they were all a similar time.



The window was clearly removed at some point; here again is one from a series that has been called "the last pictures taken in 30th St." (in Chuck Granata's wonderful book "Sessions with Sinatra", IIRC).



(Anybody have a better version of that one? Mine is pretty grainy.)

No window visible, although a better pic would show it more clearly. There are some smudges where the window was.

The middle three pictures are from the Plaut Collection at Yale, and how awesome is it that Fred got shots of so much that tell us about the details of the studio?

 

As Dan shows now, a window we've seldom seen yet.

Of course, they removed the little window in the New Control Room, too - maybe about the same time? Here's a frame grab from the Company video near the end, when Elaine Stritch leaves after not being able to get a good take of "Lunch." No window for "D" on the white wall now, but as she leaves, she goes up the 2 steps, pulls open the door, and inside looks like another door straight ahead to me. The door to the control room would be just inside to the left.