WSIA - FM 88.9 - Richmond, NY

In the mid 1970s, a group of students interested in radio gathered in a broom closet in the C Building of The College of Staten Island. They ran some wire to the cafeteria and started spinning records. These students worked with the College and applied for an FM license. They ... See more were granted a construction permit. Not much more progress was made until the late 1970s when a new group of students applied to the Student Government and Association for money to start construction. In 1980, a General Manager was hired to get the station on the air. It took a year to work out an agreement for an antenna site on Todt Hill (the tallest pont on the East Coast), install phone lines to the site for the transmitter, and to complete construction of the studios in the basement of E building on the Sunnyside campus. On August 31, 1981, WSIA began regularly scheduled programming. It was the culmination of a tremendous amount of hard work by members of the College and students. Yet, it was only the beginning. Since that time, a great number of students have been trained to become staff members. Some have gone on to careers in radio. Others look back on WSIA as an important part of their student life. For the next 12 years, WSIA-FM languished somewhat invisibly in the E-building basement below the cafeteria at the Sunnyside campus. Few people at the college even knew the E-building had a basement or that CSI had a radio station. However, many people from outside the immediate College community had come to realize just what WSIA was doing. With the format in place, WSIA began gaining a reputation for playing music that nobody else on the overcrowded New York radio dial was. The audience soon grew into other parts of the City, and then Northern New Jersey as well.

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