New Brunswick Marconi Station was located at JFK Boulevard and Easton Avenue just a few minutes from the New Brunswick border. Today it is the site of Marconi Park. It was an early radio transmitter facility built in 1913 and operated by the American Marconi Wireless Corporation. After the partial failure of transatlantic telegraph cables, the facility was confiscated by the United States Navy on April 7, 1917, to provide transatlantic communications during World War I. The New Brunswick Naval Radio Station was the principal wartime communication link between the United States and Europe, using the callsign NFF. President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech was transmitted from the site in 1918. After the war, ownership of the station, along with Marconi's other US assets, was transferred from the Navy to RCA. The antenna masts were demolished in 1952 to make room for what is now a small mall containing a Kmart, but the buildings on the other side of JFK Boulevard were spared. All but one of the brick buildings were demolished around 2004 to make way for a storage locker facility. The bricks and tiles were saved for use in any future restoration of the spared building, and the Marconi facility in Belmar, New Jersey.
The station used a huge 5,000-foot-long (1,500 m) antenna supported by eight 400-foot (120 m) steel masts, similar to the AT&T long wave telephone transmitter at RCA's Rocky Point, Long Island, transmitter facility. During World War I, the original Marconi spark transmitter was replaced with an Alexanderson alternator, the invention of the famous General Electric engineer, with an output power of 200 kilowatts and looking like an ordinary power station generator. Its frequency was around 17 kHz, which made its wavelength around 17,500 meters.
When I was a teenager growing up in this part of town this was not a park yet.
I remember sitting on the old steps that were overgrown with trees and weeds, smoking cigarettes wondering what was here before. That was before the internet and easily accessable information. I didn't know the importance of this site until recently. I guess I could have found out about it with a little research at the library but, I was too busy getting into trouble with my friends.
I do remember the brick buildings that were torn down to make room for the storage facility. I remember one of them was a halfway house and I knew someone that lived there for a while.
This cache is meant to be a quick park & grab... That's if you can figure out how to get into the parking lot. If you can't, no big deal you can park in the nearby shopping center and walk across JFK. Plenty of parking there.
I think it's a pretty easy cache. Most of us have seen it before, but it might be hard for a new cacher.
Please replace cache as you found it. Do not over tighten lid of cache, but make sure camo is snug in it's place. You'll see what I mean when you are there.
Thank you to "avgraphics" for allowing me to take over this location. I hope everyone enjoys my cache as much as I did placing it.
Congratulations to bigbone0723 & CacherMCW for FTF.