The 6th Borough Cable Access station, ZCAT, still transmits its broadcasts over terrestrial TV. Through radio waves. These suckers send out the signal to the top of the Zaghaven Spire, which then transmits it to the rest of the 6th. Although you’re supposed to be able to tune into ZCAT at UHF channel 64, the safest bet has always been to wad up an old matchbook and wedge into into your your regular dial (VHF) – holding it between channels 6 and 7.
At this point, the FCC considers us a pirate station, but they don’t really consider us at all.
On a good clear night, if you still have an old TV with a set of rabbit-ears, you can catch us in Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, and even some parts of Connecticut.
That building isn’t the Z-Cat Studio, it’s a waste-processing dump. The Z-Cat Studios are over to the right.
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| You can see the tip of Blue Kills Park and the Underwood Graveyard in the background there. |
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| See, there’s Z-CAT Studios. It’s a little rundown. |
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| Zaghaven Spire. So it’s a more of a rusted out old water tower. A perfectly pleasant mutant family live in there. They tend to the signals using their mutant lightning brains. Otherwise, there’d be absolutely no broadcasting whatsoever. At all. |
When we were younger, we would hang out in the graveyard looking at the jalopy in the sky and thinking, "Wouldn't it be great to be on the ZCAT station?". As Mr P would say, "Fool me once, shame on you"
And then we'd build dirt castles and go swimming in the moat that surrounds the graveyard castle.
I am almost certain I once caught a Z-CAT broadcast back in the days.
Now that I think about it though, it might have been the DuMont network I was watching.
Brother my brother, how old are you?
Anyway, you're sort of right. When they destroyed all of the DuMont programming in the 70's, there was a chamber in basement of Z-CAT studios where a lot of that programming just — materialized.
In fact, it saved a lot of dead space there in the 80's when Z-Cats were supposed to be making tv but instead were out popping pizza pills (Zaghaven has it's own drug problems) and catching wreck at Blue Kills block parties. Paramount threatened to shut down the Cat but their goons could never find us.
That's why we're able to broadcast Seinfeld to this day.
Old enough to know right from wrong I guess.
Not old enough to have seen the honeymooners when they first aired though.
(The Honeymooners were originally on DuMont.)
Pizza Pills you say? Is it anything like Pizza Balls?