CBS Broadcast Center
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The CBS Broadcast Center is a television and radio production facility located in New York City. It's CBS's main East Coast production center, much as Television City in Los Angeles is the West Coast hub.
The nearly block long facility at 524 West 57th Street, in the Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan, serves as the headquarters of CBS News and the main broadcast facility for WCBS-TV, CBS News, and CBS Sports. Black Entertainment Television also uses the Broadcast Center for 106 and Park and other programming on the network. King World's nationally syndicated newsmagazine Inside Edition is also taped at the CBS Broadcast Center.
The Broadcast Center is also the production base for the CBS Radio Network. The network's Master Control (aka Central Control) on the first floor also serves as the routing center for other programming distributed by Westwood One. The radio network's flagship station, WCBS (AM), moved into the CBS Broadcast Center in 2000, after being located for more than three decades at Black Rock, CBS's corporate headquarters at 51 West 52nd Street.
The building in which the Broadcast Center is located formerly served as a dairy depot for Sheffield Farms. CBS, which had been using studios at Grand Central Terminal and other theatres throughout Manhattan, purchased the production center in 1952 and began using it regularly for TV in 1963. The radio network, which had been based in the old CBS corporate headquarters at 485 Madison Avenue, moved to the Broadcast Center in July 1964, while the television network's master control moved from Grand Central to the Broadcast Center in late 1964.
Until 1999, the Broadcast Center was home to CBS-TV's soap opera, As the World Turns (the defunct serials Love of Life and Search for Tomorrow were also produced at the Broadcast Center). Broadcasting's oldest soap, Guiding Light, has returned to the Broadcast Center, after a number of years at the New York Production Center on the east side of Manhattan. As the World Turns is recorded in Brooklyn at the former NBC Studios, which housed defunct soap opera Another World (as a result of the move, As the World Turns acquired many of Another World's old sets, which can still be seen today).
In addition to the Broadcast Center, CBS has two other major studio centers in Manhattan — the Ed Sullivan Theater (CBS-TV Studio 50) at 1697 Broadway, the home of the Late Show with David Letterman; and the General Motors Building (CBS-TV Studio 58) on Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, in which The Early Show is produced. From the 1950s to 70s, another prominent CBS stage in New York was Studio 52 (now the disco-theatre Studio 54) at 254 West 54th Street, around the corner from Studio 50.
