This ground-level TV antenna tower at 400 N Griffin Street was built by KRLD-TV when it signed on in the late 1940s, and was used continuously as a studio-transmitter link to the Cedar Hill tower from its construction in 1955 until Channel 4 vacated the N Griffin Street studios in 2014.
From the excellent Fybush broadcasting blog: (
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"'Tower site' does Dallas Site IV
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A few blocks away from here, of course, is the infamous Grassy Knoll, Dealey Plaza, the Book Depository and all those other reminders of that terrible day 39 years ago this week; we had a chance to visit the Sixth Floor Museum, and it's an interesting experience indeed.
From there, it's only a few blocks to 400 North Griffin Street, the longtime home of channel 4 in Dallas, dating all the way back to its days as KRLD-TV. This is where Dan Rather was based when he covered the Kennedy assassination - but today channel 4 doesn't even carry Rather's nightly newscast, having switched from CBS to Fox in 1995 during the big Fox/New World affiliation shuffle.
In the meantime, of course, channel 4 had changed from KRLD-TV to KDFW (the KRLD calls stayed with the radio side, which split off in 1974), the calls it still uses today as "Fox 4."
And today there's a second station sharing the building; Fox also owns independent KDFI (Channel 27), which carries most of the local telecasts of Rangers baseball and Stars hockey.
The tower next to the studio building is still used for STLs (Studio-Transmitter Links) and ENG (Electronic News Gathering); I believe it's the original channel 4 tower from the days before KRLD-TV and WFAA-TV built the Cedar Hill site in 1955. . . . "
From Wikipedia: (
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"KDFW, virtual channel 4 (UHF digital channel 35), is a Fox owned-and-operated television station serving the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex that is licensed to Dallas, Texas, United States. The station is owned by the Fox Television Stations subsidiary of 21st Century Fox, as part of a duopoly with MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station KDFI (channel 27). The two stations share studio facilities located at 400 North Griffin Street in downtown Dallas; KDFW maintains transmitter facilities located south of Belt Line Road in Cedar Hill.
History
As a CBS affiliate
The station first signed on the air at 12:30 p.m. on December 3, 1949 as KRLD-TV; it was founded by the Dallas Times Herald newspaper (now defunct), which also owned KRLD radio (1080 AM, and 92.5 FM, now KZPS). Channel 4 originally operated as a CBS affiliate – having inherited the affiliation through the CBS Radio Network's longtime relationship with KRLD (AM), which became the first radio station in Texas to affiliate with the television network's radio predecessor in 1927. The first program ever broadcast on KRLD-TV on that afternoon was the CBS game show It Pays to Be Ignorant; the first local program aired on the station that day was a college football game in which the Notre Dame Fighting Irish defeated the Southern Methodist Mustangs, 27-20.
The station inherited the call letters of its radio sister – which was named after Edwin Kiest, an original investor and later owner of KRLD (AM), and the radio station's founding owner, Radio Laboratories of Dallas. Channel 4 was the third television station to sign on in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, following Dallas-based KBTV (channel 8, now WFAA), which launched three months earlier on September 17; and Fort Worth-licensed WBAP-TV (channel 5, now KXAS-TV), which debuted on September 29, 1948. It was also the fourth Texas-based television station to be granted a license by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
KRLD-TV originally produced its programming from a temporary studio facility located north of the Times Herald building, operating at that building until its full-time facilities based at the Times Herald offices at 1101 Patterson Street in downtown Dallas were completed. The original transmitter tower on Griffin Street and San Jacinto Avenue, which provided a signal spanning approximately 90 miles (140 km) from the site, was the tallest free-standing television transmission tower in the world at the time at 586 feet (179 m). In May 1955, the station began construction of a new 1,521 feet (464 m)-tall tower in Cedar Hill. At the time of its completion in October 1955, the structure was considered to be the tallest television broadcast tower in the world (once KRLD-TV moved its transmitter to the Cedar Hill tower in early 1956, the original Griffin Street transmitter remained in use as an auxiliary facility until it was disassembled in 1984; the antenna on which it was installed was torn down in 1995, in order to reduce the load on the tower).
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KRLD-TV served as the home base for CBS' network coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, when suspect Lee Harvey Oswald (from an upper-floor window at the Texas School Book Depository) shot his rifle at sniper range at the Presidential motorcade carrying Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally as it had turned onto Elm Street. Eddie Barker, who was KRLD-TV's news director at the time and had been with the station since it signed on fourteen years earlier as one of the original members of its news department staff, was the first person to announce Kennedy's death on television, relaying a message from an official at Parkland Hospital that Kennedy had succumbed from the gunshot wound as doctors conducted emergency surgery. Because of a local press pool arrangement that was put in place that morning to cover Kennedy's speech at the Trade Mart downtown, Barker's scoop appeared live simultaneously on CBS, which had sent correspondent Dan Rather to report from Dealey Plaza, and ABC. Two days later, a KRLD-TV field crew captured footage of Oswald's assassination by nightclub owner Jack Ruby as officers were transferring the former in handcuffs out of the Dallas Police Department's downtown precinct.
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On May 15, 1970, the Times Herald and the KRLD radio and television stations were sold to the Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Company for US$30 million. . . . The sale to Times-Mirror was finalized on July 2, 1970, at which point – due to FCC rules that prohibited separately owned broadcast properties based in the same market from using the same callsign – the station changed its call letters to KDFW-TV, in reference to its service area of Dallas and Fort Worth . . .
As a Fox station
On May 23, 1994 . . . New World Communications signed a long-term affiliation agreement with the Fox Broadcasting Company. Under the initial agreement, nine television stations affiliated with either CBS, ABC or NBC – . . . and four others that it acquired on May 5 from Great American Communications . . . would become Fox affiliates once their existing respective affiliation contracts expired. The deal was part of a strategy by Fox to strengthen its affiliate portfolio after the National Football League (NFL) accepted the network's US$1.58 billion bid for the television rights to the National Football Conference (NFC), a four-year contract that began with the 1994 NFL season, on December 18, 1993.. . .
Although the network already owned KDAF, Fox sought the opportunity to align with KDFW because of its stronger market position (the station placed second, behind WFAA, in total day and news viewership at the time) and its operation of a news department. . . .
CBS had a thirteen-month leeway to find a new Dallas-Fort Worth affiliate, as its contract with KDFW did not expire until July 1, 1995 . . . KTVT was CBS's only viable option among the Metroplex's VHF television stations, particularly as it was the only other English language station in the market that had a news department (at the time, KTVT had been producing a prime time newscast, which debuted in 1990). On September 14, 1994, Gaylord Broadcasting reached an agreement to affiliate KTVT with CBS, . . . The last CBS network program to air on KDFW-TV was a repeat of Walker, Texas Ranger at 9:00 p.m. Central Time on July 1; this led into a message by then-station president and general manager David Whitaker shortly before the start of its late-evening newscast. . . informing viewers about the pending network changes.
KDFW switched to Fox on July 2, 1995, ending its relationship with CBS after 45½ years; the remainder of CBS's programming moved on that date to KTVT, which consequently ceased distribution as a regional superstation on cable and satellite providers outside of its viewing area.
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Analog-to-digital conversion
KDFW shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 4, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 35, using PSIP to display KDFW's virtual channel as 4 on digital television receivers.
Through its participation as a SAFER Act "nightlight" broadcaster, KDFW kept its analog signal on the air until July 12 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.''
As of 2014 KDFW-TV has moved out of its old downtown Dallas Griffin Street studio and the complex with the landmark tower awaits development."