off since the payoff stood well on its own. Fire and aftermath At about 8 p.m. on Sunday, December 21, 1975, WALL suffered a fire which gutted its North Street studios, killing several residents in a third-floor apartment, and forcing the station to move to an abandoned, block-long Armory building in Middletown. WALL was off the air less than half an hour; using remote broadcast equipment that was stored at the transmitter site on Monhagen Avenue, the station began broadcasting from the transmitter building using records borrowed from employees. The old Armory building had already been purchased by Oroco (which changed its name to Castle Communications to commemorate the acquisition), with the intent of moving the radio station there within a year; instead, the move happened overnight. WALL signed on from the Armory at 6 o’clock the morning after the fire, using remote equipment borrowed from sister station WHVW in Hyde Park, New York. Temporary studios were quickly constructed in a basement gym, with permanent studios constructed as originally planned on the second floor of the Armory, and offices on the first floor. In 1979, WALL and sister WKGL (the former WALL-FM) were purchased by a consortium headed by media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman and New York air personality Bruce Morrow ("Cousin Brucie"). Headquartering their group in Middletown at the Armory (now re-christened "One Broadcast Plaza"), major changes took place with WALL flipping first to a top 40/adult contemporary hybrid format, and later to Adult standards; WKGL went to an oldies format and then to top 40 format. In 1984, Sillerman and Morrow sold WALL and WKGL to long time employee Dick Bell's Bell Broadcasting Company for 10.4 million dollars (This sale included WJJB, 97.7 Hyde Park, NY and WRAN, Dover, NJ. 1980s and 1990s By 1985 WALL began to regroup by bringing in program director Rob Dillman and flipping to a higher-energy oldies format. With this change came the acquisition of sports programming such as New York Mets baseball, New York Giants football, and various local sports and other community events. Additionally, WALL rehired some of the air talent from its top 40 heyday, including Joe Ryan. In the WALL's "45th Anniversary Reunion Broadcast", on the weekend of August 2–3, 1987, the station looked back to its past and reunited air personalities including "Cousin Brucie", Howard Hoffman, Dave Charity, John Fisher, Ray Arthur, Randy West, Gene Pelc, Al Faust,