User:RazzmatazzWilson/sandbox

Following its April 14, 1960 groundbreaking, the three-level Broadcast House at 3 Constitution Plaza (i.e., the northwest corner of State Street and Columbus Boulevard) was formally dedicated on November 27, 1961, making it the first building to open at the complex. The inauguration ceremony included the world premiere performance of "The Broadcaster: A Symphonic Suite," composed for the occasion by the orchestra's conductor Robert Maxwell. Built at a cost of $2.3 mil., Broadcast House contained 80,000 square feet, 12,000 of which comprised broadcast operations. It was designed to take advantage of the new "lift slab" method of construction by architects Fulmer & Bowers and builder Lewis C. Bowers and contained 98 reinforced prefabricated panels which were lifted by cranes and placed vertically to form both outside and inside walls in one operation. With its cantilevered waffle-like roof parapet with a roof garden space in the center, the squat square structure sat mostly below plaza level with a street entrance on Columbus Boulevard and a plaza entrance over State Street that faced the Phoenix Life Insurance Company Building. Originally it was the combined home of WTIC (AM), WTIC-FM, and Channel 3, the local CBS affiliate then licensed as WTIC-TV, all of which had been operating in tandem from the studios and offices that the Travelers Insurance Company ('TIC) first constructed when it founded WTIC in 1925 in its building at 26 Grove Street (renamed as "Bob Steele Street" in 2013). Studio tours made Broadcast House a popular tourist destination during its WTIC era. When the Travelers sold all of its broadcasting stations in March 1974, Post-Newsweek Stations, which purchased Channel 3, changed the WTIC-TV call letters to WFSB. (Channel 61 in Hartford would later assume the WTIC-TV call letters when it was launched by Arch Communications in September 1984.) As WFSB, Channel 3 became the sole occupant of Broadcast House in October 1974 when WTIC and WTIC-FM, which the Travelers had sold to the local Ten Eighty Corporation, were relocated to the nearby Gold Building at One Financial Plaza in downtown Hartford. In June 1997, WFSB was acquired by Meredith Corporation which moved Channel 3 to a new state-of-the-art facility in the southern suburb of Rocky Hill in July 2007. Broadcast House was demolished in 2009; the site where it once stood remains vacant and fenced-off.