a law requiring the FCC to automatically renew the license of any VHF station that moved its license to a state not served by a commercial VHF station. New Jersey and Delaware were the only states not to be served by a commercial VHF station, and there were complaints for many years that New Jersey in particular had been "underserved" by VHF stations from the New York City and Philadelphia markets (New Jersey was left without any commercial VHF allocations located within the state due to the 1962 conversion of Newark's channel 13 to a non-commercial outlet). Soon after this law took effect, RKO moved WOR-TV's license to Secaucus, New Jersey ( west of Manhattan) on April 20, 1983. However, for all intents and purposes, it remained a New York City station. WOR radio had originally been licensed to Newark when it signed on in 1922; while it moved its studios across the Hudson River in 1926, it remained licensed in Newark until 1941. One of the FCC's conditions of renewing channel 9's license required RKO to also move the station's main studio to New Jersey. Three years after its city of license was moved to New Jersey, WOR-TV moved its operations to the newly built Nine Broadcast Plaza in Secaucus on January 13, 1986. The FCC also required channel 9 to increase its coverage of events on the New Jersey side of the market. One month later, the New Jersey State Senate petitioned the FCC to approve an extension of the channel 9 signal into southern New Jersey. Because of various other issues, one of which would be the fact that rights to most syndicated programs would interfere with the local broadcast rights to these shows on Philadelphia stations, the request was denied. The move to New Jersey did little to relieve the regulatory pressure on RKO. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, RKO put channel 9 up for sale in 1985. Westinghouse Broadcasting, Chris-Craft Industries, and a joint venture of Cox Enterprises and MCA/Universal emerged as the leading suitors for WOR-TV; the station was sold to the Cox/MCA group in late 1986 for $387 million. Cox later withdrew the joint venture due to disagreements between the two firms on who would be responsible for running the station, leaving MCA to take sole ownership of WOR-TV on April 21, 1987. The sale came just in the nick of time