Eminem Took a Helicopter to a Z100 Interview. The Station's Old Address Tells Us Roughly When.

A radio veteran's throwback carousel includes a photo with Em and a three-minute flight across the Hudson. Here is what she actually wrote, and what the paper trail says about the year.

On Tuesday, September 22, Sharon Dastur, who spent close to two decades programming New York's Z100, posted "Chapter 9" of a throwback series marking her 30 years in New York. It is a carousel titled "The Legends": Madonna, Jay Z, Shakira, Cher, Janet, George Michael, Stevie, Mary J. Blige, Barbra Streisand, Rod Stewart, Sting, Kanye West, and a photo of Dastur standing next to Eminem in front of the Z100 logo. Each picture gets one line of commentary. Eminem's line is the best story in the set.

Dastur's "Legends" carousel. The Eminem photo is in the cover collage and among the slides.

What she actually wrote

Here is the caption line exactly as it appears on the post:

Sharon Dastur: "Eminem - the only artist to take a helicopter from Manhattan to Jersey City for the interview. We could see him takeoff from the West Side Hwy and land on the Jersey side 3 minutes later"

That is worth quoting precisely because it is already drifting. One widely shared version has her saying Eminem "rented a helicopter" and that "we watched him take off on the West Side"; neither phrase is in the post. Some coverage also described the series as a personal blog of candid, non-press snapshots. It is an Instagram carousel, and at least one image in the cover collage (the Shakira photo) carries a visible Getty Images watermark, so not everything in it came out of a shoebox. The Eminem photo itself has no credit on it. Dastur does not give a year, an album, or the name of the show he was booked on.

Why Jersey City, and why that dates it

The detail that makes this story checkable is the destination. Today Z100 broadcasts from 125 West 55th Street in Midtown Manhattan. It has not always been in New York. The station signed on in August 1983 from studios in Secaucus, New Jersey, and later moved to the Jersey City waterfront: a January 2002 listing from the M Street Radio Directory, matched at the time by Clear Channel's own website, put Z100 at 101 Hudson Street, 36th floor, Jersey City. That is the 42-story tower at Exchange Place, directly across the Hudson from Lower Manhattan.

That view is the other half of her sentence. Radio journalist Scott Fybush, touring Clear Channel's later Manhattan facility in 2010, wrote that the new Z100 studio lacked "the million-dollar view that the old Z100 Jersey City studios enjoyed." From 36 floors up on the Jersey side, you could plausibly watch a helicopter lift off from Manhattan's West Side and cross the river. Dastur does not name the pad, but the West 30th Street Heliport sits right on the Hudson off the West Side Highway, which fits her description.

Then the window closes. Clear Channel consolidated its New York FM stations, Z100 included, into a new facility at 32 Avenue of the Americas in Tribeca; according to Radio World, the first station moved in on January 29, 2008. After that, nobody needed to cross the Hudson to get to Z100.

So the helicopter trip happened while Z100 was in Jersey City: no later than early 2008, and in a period when the station is documented there by early 2002. We could not find a reliable source for exactly when the Secaucus-to-Jersey City move happened, so we are not going to guess at the opening end.

Which era, then?

Inside that window, Eminem's big promotional pushes were The Eminem Show and 8 Mile in 2002, and Encore in late 2004, with Curtain Call following in December 2005. After that he largely disappeared from promo duty until Relapse in 2009, by which point Z100 was in Tribeca. That makes the Eminem Show and Encore cycles the likeliest candidates. The photo does not settle it: he is in a dark baseball cap with white script lettering in front of a Z100 sign, a look he wore across both eras. The honest answer: 2002 to 2005 is the best fit, but nothing in the post confirms a year.

It also rules one thing out. The Z100 interview clip that still circulates among fans, a Recovery-era sit-down from June 2010 where he dodged a question about Hailie dating, came after the Tribeca move. That one required no aircraft.

Who Sharon Dastur is

Dastur is not a casual name-dropper. She joined Z100 in 1996, rose to program director, and when iHeartMedia moved her to its national programming team in December 2014, the company said she had spent more than 18 years at the station. She co-created and executive produced Z100's Jingle Ball, then moved to the label side as senior vice president of promotion at Republic Records in late 2017, and in August 2021 joined Global, the UK radio company, as a senior programming and content advisor and its US liaison to artist managers and labels.

Which brings up one correction we want to make before it spreads: despite that Jingle Ball connection, we could find no record of Eminem ever playing the show. The Z100 Jingle Ball lineups for 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004, as logged on setlist.fm, do not include him or D12. His Z100 history is on the airwaves and in the interview chair, not on the Madison Square Garden stage.

For an artist who has spent most of the last two decades avoiding interviews, as his rare Shade 45 sit-down last month reminded everyone, the image of him taking a helicopter to be on time for one is its own small joke. It also fits the Eminem of The Eminem Show era: the biggest rapper alive, apparently unwilling to sit in Holland Tunnel traffic for a pop station. Dastur remembered it for 20-odd years for a reason. Em has never been much for posting (his 2018 Twitter takeover remains the exception), so rare glimpses like this tend to come from the people who were in the room.

Three minutes in the air, one line on Instagram, and the only way to date it is a building's lease. Radio history is weird like that.