The other side of the set

Today‘s first home, the RCA Exhibition Hall on 49th Street, is an ongoing fascination for me. Unfortunately, among the buildings of Rockefeller Center, it’s too often lost as an obscurity.

via Science History Institute

The building itself is still there – it’s now occupied by Christie’s auction house, which extensively remodeled the place but kept those big windows – but good luck finding much about its past. Which is why a find like the one you’re about to see is something else.

Let’s take a moment to look back on that first day of Today, January 14, 1952:

NBC photo

This is as far to the viewer’s left as the set went, and it’s where the big newspaper board was set up. But in some shots you can tell there’s something more back there, and it looks like people are looking on from behind the newspaper board. Why is that? Because only a portion of the RCA Exhibition Hall was used for the Today set.

Thanks to the January 1954 issue of RCA’s house publication, Radio Age, we can get an idea of what you would have seen on the other side of that board.

RCA photo

That panoramic view shows you the remainder of the RCA Exhibition Hall, which continued to serve its original function. (There wasn’t really a big white line; that’s an artifact from how the magazine printed the photo across two pages.) On the right-hand side of that panorama, look at what you see:

RCA photo

Just up that set of steps is the Today set. Which, believe it or not, was incorporated into the Exhibition Hall as a display in itself. When the building opened to the general public in late morning, after Today had gone off the air for the day, visitors could get a look at it as an example of how RCA technology was involved in the production of a daily news program.

Many thanks and much gratitude to the folks at American Radio History for digitizing this and hundreds of other vintage broadcast industry publications. You can check out this issue of Radio Age – and dozens of others – here.