RIP WHJJ/WHJY, as of some point in December 2019. The former WHJJ/WHJY radio station came to me and C. Enzo's attention after an exploration video that I'm sure a few others on here have already seen appeared on YouTube a couple years ago. I refuse to link it here because it directly accelerated the deterioration and theft of anything worth taking from the studio. The video and its explorer/presenter explicitly and unashamedly made this location public and may as well have given step by step instructions of how to reach it. Over the course of three visits over four weeks we very acutely noticed items both large and small disappear from the station, most prominently the two JBL studio monitor speakers in the recording room, at least two tape decks, and a not insubstantial shelf of magneto-optical disks containing backups of data from during its operation.
This is one of the few abandoned buildings we've explored that still had power, if only in a small corner. Many tapes and records still sat in their shelves, many decks and other pieces of recording equipment sat hooked to mixing tables, and plenty of stickers and fridge magnets proved it had been a bustling little box of creativity in its day.
That time has passed.
The building and everything in it are gone, as we only just found out last weekend when I just happened to drive past the building while C. Enzo, Stringbean (a non-UER friend who joined us to explore this place), and I visited a nearby diner. I've been sitting on photos from the trips that we made there in August/September 2018. As there is nothing left to damage or steal, I figure it's now safe to post them. I know not if anyone else has posted a thread for this location yet. These photos are not in chronological order, but are compiled from all three trips in an order that hopefully best serves to describe the place, and detail our efforts to take everything we could, without taking anything at all.
01: WHJJTook me 'til the third trip to get a good outdoor shot of this place.
02: Building SideA terrible photo of the side of the station building.
03: Right CornerThere's a tarp on the roof of this corner of the building. Judging by the condition of the second floor, it's not working.
04: Signal FeedWires run from the transmitter room to the big antennas.
05: Here AgainThe original shot of this room was entirely too dark, so I reshot it on the second visit.
06: Equipment StackAs is my trademark, I forgot to focus the camera for this shot.
07: Big ServersThe first thing one seems when getting into this building is a stack of gigantic old servers lying on their sides. I sorely want to power one up when we come back if we can find a monitor.
08: Transmitter DoorDespite being abandoned, this place did still have a live, operating transmitter behind this big door. This door was very closed to us, courtesy of some chain holding it shut on the other side.
09: Chained ShutMy phone's old and grainy video camera managed to see what appears to be a chain holding the door shut. With this revelation, unbarring the door is impossible without damaging it.
10: Federal LawWe legitimately only noticed this little typewritten warning after all our attempts failed.
11: Tape Machines (Vertical)I discovered that the light in this room still worked to some extent, allowing me to photograph the room much more clearly. The fluorescent bulb here was also nearly dead and the room was much darker than my massive increase in post exposure makes this photo seem.
12: It's Alive!Besides the aesthetic damage to the lower face of this machine, it looks like it could still be in working order, doesn't it? We learned this not to be true, as all of the control cards had been stolen out of the machine. It could power on, but could only sit there braindead. These machines are probably in a dump somewhere now, their cards turned into a thief's cash. Maybe it's for the better as the cards live on somewhere.
13: Under the HoodThe control deck lifts up like a car's hood to reveal its electro-mechanical underside. Each sprocket is driven by a capstan motor, which C. Enzo described as "just one cost more than my soul".
14: Mixing RoomPulling a hard left out of the room we entered through leads into a room with two large mixing tables (at least that's what I think they are), an adorable but smashed television, and some other equipment. The mixing table shown here has been pulled out of the desk it used to be a part of and its wires all severed. There used to be sound-dampening foam all around the room too but most of it's been torn off.
15: Other EndStanding at the other end of the room shows the intact mixing table, complete with WHJJ headboard. Through the window at the other end is the first room with the stack of receivers.
16: TalkRadio920Save for one missing slot, the entire mixer appears to be intact.
17: BE 1200 SeriesThese are tape decks of some sort, but I'm not sure if they're for 8-track cartridges or if it's something else. C. Enzo mentioned that some of the sound effect tapes found elsewhere only have one track and were designed in a loop.
18: Electrical ViolationsTurning 180* around from the "Other End" photo, walking through the door, and turning immediately left leads to an electrical clusterfuck. According to C. Enzo, the wiring here was "all wrong".
19: Littered HallwayPulling another 180 in the electrical room provides a view down a hallway full of dirty or damaged equipment. The smashed double-paned window to the right looks in on the mixing room that I'd just come from. The window on the left leads into a different station's broadcasting room.
20: CluesGee whiz, which station could this be?
21: 94 WHJYNo that's not a typo - WHJY and WHJJ are sister stations and shared the same building. Unfortunately the sun was bright and clear today so the light coming in through the window dominates the lightspace. A lot of equipment is missing, presumably taken when WHJY and WHJJ moved to new buildings or stolen by other hooligans, but what's left behind is intact and largely undamaged.
22: Mission ControlFrom what we understand, this is the room from which all of WHJY's live broadcasts aired. We found mailboxes for Paul and Al, Jen, and Charles; it was pretty neat to be standing in the same room they stood in two decades ago. This station has the same mixing table as the two in WHJJ.
23: Tape LibraryStuffed in the corner behind the broadcasting booth is a set of shelves for music and other cartridges. I'm sure there were many more back in the day, and there were several strewn across the floor. In hindsight I should've put them back in the shelves.
24: MEGADEATH HDThere are a few interesting titles lying around still.
25: CoughboxHere is a mic control box for live broadcasting. It features a Mic 2 button, for enabling a second mic for guests, and a Cough button, presumably to mute the mic if someone sneezes or coughs.
26: AlcoholTurning around from the tape library, I noticed a couple of old and unopened beers sitting in a different empty tape library.
27: Studio MonitorsIn a previous photo the left speaker is missing its grille. While shooting this room I found the missing grill and put it back on. This is a pair of JBL Studio Monitor 4412 speakers. When I asked one of my audiophile friends what he thought about them, he responded with "Holy FUCK I hope you took those". For many reasons we did not, and have no intention of doing so. Less than a week later, someone else did.
28: G40This chunky little CRT monitor is still perched on its beefy monitor stand. It's hard to see in the photo but there's a GUI burned into the screen - it may have gone to a computer that always had one program running, or it may have displayed output from some other purpose-built device. This monitor appears to be intact but doesn't turn on - it's power cable ran off to somewhere I couldn't see and this part of the building appeared to have lost power entirely.
29: Ancient HistoryAround the building we found some old photos from when the place was still active. We intend to photograph these in futher detail during a future trip.
30: Paul & AlThis award was lying on the floor of the room. We had half a mind to take it with and mail it to Paul and Al at the current WHJY station. This had been stolen by our third trip.
31: Red PentiumOpposite the hallway of the WHJY recording room was another room that had a very old desktop computer in it. I'm not sure if this was a server room or IT closet or what since nearly everything else has been pulled out.
32: The Broken CircleThe window of the computer room had a large hole punched through it, possibly by a baseball or some other projectile. The WHJY broadcasting room is visible beyond the glass.
33: Front Room (Left)There are a surprising number of intact televisions here. This room presents two options: the door on the left that leads to another office or to the littered hallway, or the door on the right which goes up a staircase to the second floor.
34: Left HallThis hallway had a bunch of plastic mailboxes on its walls and led to an office littered with coax and RCA adapters and other technical trinkets.
35: Worn PathPapers and cardboard also litter this room. If I'd turned left here, the left wall was covered with a gigantic map of the state, which C. Enzo photographed.
36: Messy DeskPiles of papers everywhere form quite the fire hazard. There was a small CRT monitor at the other end of the room on a desk at the right, but this room had lost power too so it couldn't turn on.
37: MarantzThis fancy little tape deck sat on a filing cabinet. This deck had been stolen by the time of our third trip. The box behind it is either a Data Transfer Switch, the manual and terrible precursor to KVM switches, or a parallel switch for switching a printer between two machines.
38: UpstairsBacking out into the lobby and choosing the stairs got me up to the second floor, which I hadn't seen last time.
39: Dino VibesFollowing the hallway right leads into the common area. Since this place was full of 1990's equipment and abandoned in 2003, there's a Jurassic Park 3 kind of feel here. It'll be interesting to see 2010's buildings abandoned in 2030 and 2040
40: If the previous photo was taken from the South-West corner, then this photo would be taken from the South-East corner. The second floor has not fared anywhere close to as well as the first floor - the ceiling is letting a lot of water in and there's mold and mildew everywhere.
41: Case and PointThe small employee kitchen is practically melting from water damage and is bathed in rot.
42: Hell's KitchenIt's probably the most disgusting room in the building. The microwave is ancient and has a square food table. I left this room immediately.
43: Rotten HallBacking out of the kitchen and turning left leads to some offices and a copier.
44: Trashed OfficeLots of debris everywhere amidst a broken window.
~~INTERMISSION~~In between the second and third trips, C. Enzo and I, along with Stringbean, realized that since the place still had power and equipment, we could probably salvage audio off of the tapes left behind there. Thus we planned our third trip and packed some different equipment.
45: Right to ItOur third trip was not a trip for photography; we jumped immediately into the data recovery. Knowing the Otari decks were braindead without their controller cards, we instead pulled one of the BE decks from the WHJJ mixing room and brought it to a room with power. In this photo, C. Enzo tests the tape deck's ability to load tapes.
46: The DeckThis is the one Stereo BE deck that was in the rack. We found a metric buttload of these Fidelipac cartridges in a back room. They're also known as NAB cartridges, or just "carts" in slang. The deck itself is industrial - look at that chain for driving the loading system. We hid this deck inside a drawer of an obscure desk so that it would stay safe so we could use it again on a return trip. Unfortunately this is now impossible.
47: The SetupC. Enzo's laptop and the BE deck next to each other. We still had to come up with a way to get the tape deck's output to be electrically compatible with the laptop's Line In jack.
48: SpaghettiC. Enzo grapples with balanced and unbalanced audio signals.
49: HackfuckAfter about twenty minutes of fiddling, C. Enzo got an audio signal... from the radio transmitter one room over. Before getting audio out of the BE deck, the unshielded disaster in this photo acted as an antenna and picked up a live radio broadcast directly from the transmitter.
50: Now Almost PlayingOur first attempt at getting audio from a Fidelipac was met with failure - the carts had been sitting for so long without climate control that they'd seized themselves and the BE deck wasn't strong enough to force them to play.
51: Audio!After testing several carts, we hadn't found one that worked. I, however, stood there and quarter-inch by quarter-inch manually ran the tape through the cart until it played smoothly. That finally got us a working cart, and we started getting audio, proving the setup works!
52: ARTIST RULESI don't remember what was on this one, but we got audio off it.
53: ThumperWe found a NAB tape splicer as well that still worked and was stronger than the BE deck. It wasn't strong enough to force the tape through one continuous run, but by turning it on and off repeatedly were able to eventually force a tape through a full circuit and make it playable in the BE deck.
54: Door MagnetsHaving successfully recovered audio from several NAB carts over the course of two hours or so, we returned to looking around the place. We tried one last time to get past the transmitter door, but alas the chain kept us defeated 'til its demolition.
55: ArchiveAfter giving up with the door again, C. Enzo went back to recovering tapes while Stringbean and I putzed around in this room looking for any interesting ones.
56: Private MixerThis sound-dampening room sat at a corner of the building I'd missed before. The door to this room still worked and the glass wasn't broken - being in here alone was supremely peaceful and quiet. It was pretty much untouched, minus the obviously missing equipment under the window.
57: ConsoleEven though taggers and vandals and thieves have had their way with the place, it's still a totally worthwhile site to see.
58: Colorful ButtonsEvery slider and switch on this mixer is present and intact. It shows its many years of service.
59: Mixer DoorA shot from the other corner of this room. Tried to get the exposure as short as possible so I could hold the camera in my hands but it didn't really work.
Epilogue, written 2018/09/07: Upon leaving the building, we knew we wouldn't be able to come back for a while due to real life obligations. I almost don't want to go back, so I don't have to see what becomes of the place.
Epilogue, written 2020/11/24: Little over a year later, WHJJ met its final fate. If we'd known the clock was so close to the end, I'm sure we could've made the time to come back sooner. But alas, we can't, and so farewell, another little piece of RI history.