The front wall of the diner is made of baked porcelain painted a forest green with canary-yellow block letters that read WIRELESS and at either end announce Tables for Ladies. Above the lettering are an even dozen double-pane windows with gilt trim. The roof is accentuated by a small stainless-steel lip that gives just a touch of overhang and shades the windows.
Inside is all marble and chrome and stainless steel, offset by more neon and wooden paddle fans, deco-tiled floor, polished oak walls, and muted purple and blue spotlights. The lunch car section of the building features the original black-veined marble counter that stretches for fifteen feet with a dozen chrome and Naugahyde stools bolted to the floor behind a long brass foot rail. Behind the stools are a dozen booths with plasticized leather covering over solid-wood frames. The lunch car serves some simple dishes, standard diner food — chili, stews, an occasional goulash. The dishes sit in steam wells and fill the room with a distinctive but unidentifiable aroma.
Where the diner gives way to the interior of the old factory is where Ferrie and Most let their imaginations start to run free. Inside the brick caverns that extend backward behind the lunch car, all rules of design logic were allowed to be broken. There is no grand plan, no underlying theme to the interior of Wireless. Ferrie and Most worked slowly and instinctively in putting their world together. They filled up factory space piecemeal, as the money came in. They rustled the decor from a wide variety of sectors. One week they’d scavenge from flea markets all over New England, the next they’d pay top dollar just for the right to bid at an unannounced auction in a Manhattan gallery. They bought close-out merchandise from salvage companies. They purchased mail-order from weird trade magazines. They bartered and swapped and got involved in drawn-out installment sales on items no one could imagine them needing in the first place.
But the items always fit in with such symmetry and style that now it seems like Ferrie and Most were born master-minds of intricate design and placement. And they’ve given up on trying to convince anyone otherwise. Who could accept their protestations that everything in Wireless simply gave off a vibration? That it was the items that bagged the owners and not the other way around.
The building is now as crowded as a Victorian china cabinet. There are barber chairs occupied by full human skeletons that were donated by a couple of med school dropouts in exchange for a “regular’s” table in the diner. There are three perfectly restored, chrome-festooned Harley-Davidsons impaled through their seats by carousel poles and suspended in midair like some carnival ride for monster children. There’s the front end of a 1961 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II coupe that appears to have crashed through a sidewall, though closer inspection reveals that the loose bricks and mortar on the hood and floor are cemented in place. Next to this frozen collision is an authentic old fire-engine-red gasoline pump that one regular has customized so that a press of the nozzle dispenses what rumor purports to be a blast of nitrous oxide but what is, in fact, merely pure oxygen.
In the rear of the factory, in a section the regulars call Minnesota, is the billiards room. It includes a high wall of reference books solely devoted to radio. Some of the books are intricate manuals and others are memoirs and nostalgia from the entertainment field, but all chronicle Ferrie and Most’s lifelong obsession.
The billiards tables are actually five genuine caskets, sold at cost by an undertaker named Frankie Loftus. A couple of self-styled cabinetmakers went to work on them one day and produced a weird new version of bumper pool complete with sawed-off cues and smaller but denser pool balls. The exposed-brick walls of Minnesota are hung with framed photos of radio legends from bygone days: Major Kord, Cowboy Slim Rinehart, Rose Dawn, Paul Kallinger, and J. C. Bishop.
But most of all, inside Wireless you find radios. They’re everywhere. Crosleys, Philcos, Farnsworths, G.E.’s. Running exactly down the center of the factory are a series of floor-to-ceiling brick pillars that serve to buttress the roof. The sturdier waist-high cabinet radios are positioned around these supports like deco altars, as if the nightclub were a cathedral where each priest had his own blessed platform for performing a complex rite. The smaller, rarer models are placed on display shelves, like royal jewels or the bones of saints, underneath arcing acrylic domes. Each booth in Wireless comes equipped with its own radio done up to look like a 1950s chrome-sided, bubble-faced mini-juke.
From the start, Ferrie and Most’s shrine to radios and weirdness brought in the crowds — the curious as well as the hard core. They pumped a good cut of their profits back into the machine, kept reinvesting in atmosphere, always giving the customers more of a taste, continually upgrading their tickets to a semi-alien milieu. The process kept paying off.
Though they stumbled into the club-owner life — all tailored Italian suits and a closet just for footwear; imported two-seat cars and annual winter trips to the Caribbean — Ferrie and Most never lost their love for radio. In a prominent corner of Wireless, up on a platform that some regulars call the Shrine, they installed an original, perfect-condition, still-functional forty-one-inch-tall Stewart-Warner cabinet model with the patented Magic Keyboard tuner. But despite this beautiful receiver, they could only pick up the same, common commercial broadcasts as anyone else. Until one night when Ferrie went down in the basement to bring up a fresh case of Dewar’s, stumbled over some leftover equipment Most had stored there years before, forgot the Scotch, and hauled up a crate of dust-blanketed microphones, amplifiers, turntables, and speakers. He found an empty booth, dumped the stuff on the table, and began hooking up. His enthusiasm caught on immediately and within the hour someone had unplugged the Stewart-Warner and the club owners were sitting opposite each other, their mouths hidden by fat Electrovoice mikes, doing a show that was limited to the interior of Wireless.
But that limited audience was enough to bring back to Ferrie and Most a lost joy. Their improvised interplay had a manic quality to it. They seemed to share one set of brain waves when they were on the air. They could finish sentences for each other, come up with brilliant punch lines for on-the-spot jokes. They played rare, sometimes bootleg R&B gems between gabtime. They editorialized, prophesied, lampooned, became passionate in an odd, endearing way.
It was sometimes as if some extra, unnatural current ran between both microphones and into the hands of the men on opposite sides of the booth, some occultish line of mystery that pulled them into sync, meshed their subconscious thoughts, time-shared neurons and synapses, twinned dreams for mutual consumption. The growing cast of regulars at Wireless could feel it, but resisted speaking about it, as if they wanted to guard it, nurture it, and make it into an unspoken cult of electrical storytelling.
But like all cults, word of its existence leaked outside the borders of the diner and mill walls, and the like-minded — radio freaks of one form of another — began to gather. There were the techno-heads, people usually into shortwave and the textbook theories behind its practice. There were the nighthawks, people who only seemed to feel connected to other pockets of humanity when those pockets were perceived at 4 A.M. in a darkened room as detached and very laid-back voices drifting out of a pillow speaker. There were some d.j. groupies, some straight, simple R&B fans, some C.B. folk who loved to listen to the logistical reports of long-distance truckers, some New Wave rejects from the artsy Canal Zone who were into “random radio noise.” And there were the jammers.