WBAP-TV - Channel 5, First Television Station in Texas

The first night was rough. Wikipedia's history of the station says Channel 5 informally signed on September 27, 1948, to carry a Truman campaign speech, with regular programming starting two days later. Amon Carter stepped into an unmarked hole in the unfinished studio floor, and a power failure near the transmitter took the station off the air for about seventeen minutes. A Fort Worth Press critic still judged the evening good enough to show that television was here to stay. The Barnett Street building was the first studio designed for television.

What the plaque says

WBAP-TV - Channel 5, First Television Station in Texas Founded by Amon G. Carter, noted publisher of the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram", the first progam--a public appearance, Sept. 27, 1948, by President Harry Truman--made Texas the sixteenth state in the nation to open a commercial station. Among other "Firsts" of WBAP-TV are the first live entertainment in Texas ("Flying X Ranchboys"), and first Texas colorcast via NBC-TV, 1954. Today Channel 5 serves aproximately 60 counties in Texas and Oklahoma. Since its birth, television has made many advances. In Washington, D.C., 1927, Herbert Hoover (at that time Secretary of Commerce) appeared on the first major telecast in the nation. In 1931, H. & W. Corset Company in New York conducted the first experimental use of closed-circuit television to display its models to a buyer and sold $5,000 worth of merchandise. Modern commercial telecasting did not begin, however, until 10 years later, when New York opened the first station in the country. After a slow start, major strides were made in 1947 and 1948. As of July 1, 1967, the U.S. had 628 commercial and 128 educational stations, with 224 under construction. Of these, Texas had 49 commercial and 5 educational. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 4.0 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 5.5 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 5.8 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 6.1 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Meadowbrook Methodist Church — 0.5 mi
• I. M. Terrell High School — 2.9 mi
• Amon Carter Riverside High School and Riverside ISD — 2.9 mi
• Site of Fort Worth-Dallas Interurban — 2.9 mi