WBAI  WBAI (99.5 MHz), is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station licensed to New York City. Its programming is a mixture of progressive political news, talk and opinion from a left-leaning, liberal or progressive viewpoint, and music programming featuring a variety of music genres. The station is owned by the Pacifica Foundation with studios located at 388 Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn and transmitter located at 4 Times Square. The station began as WABF, which first went on the air in 1941 as W75NY, of Metropolitan Television, Inc. (W75NY indicating an eastern station at 47.5 MHz in New York), and moved to the 99.5 frequency in 1948. In 1955, after two years off the air, it was reborn as WBAI (after then-owners Broadcast Associates, Inc.). WBAI was purchased by philanthropist Louis Schweitzer, who donated it to the Pacifica Foundation in 1960. The station, which had been a commercial enterprise, became non-commercial and listener-supported under Pacifica ownership. The history of WBAI during this period is iconoclastic and contentious. Referred to in a "New York Times Magazine" piece as "an anarchist's circus," one station manager was jailed in protest, and the staff, in protest at sweeping proposed changes of another station manager, seized the studio facilities, then located in a deconsecrated church, as well as the transmitter, located at the Empire State Building. During the 1960s, the station hosted innumerable anti-establishment causes, including anti-Vietnam war activists, feminists (and live coverage of purported bra-burning demonstrations), kids lib, early Firesign Theater comedy, and complete-album music overnight. It refused to stop playing Janis Ian's song about interracial relationships "Society's Child". Extensive daily coverage of the Vietnam war included the ongoing body count and innumerable anti-war protests. WBAI played a major role in the evolution and development of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" was first broadcast on "Radio Unnameable", Bob Fass' freeform radio program on WBAI, a program which itself in many ways created, explored, and defined the possibilities of the form. The station covered the 1968 seizure of the Columbia University campus live and uninterrupted. With its signal reaching nearly 70 miles beyond New York City, its reach and influence, both direct and indirect, were significant.