“Joe went unexpectedly and passed away Saturday night,” friend and former producer Steve Garrin said.
Franklin was a fixture on late-night radio and TV in New York, working at WJZ and WOR, and recently at the Bloomberg Radio Network.
“The last two weeks were the first time he ever missed a broadcast in over 60 years” says Garrin.
And though he never broke on to the national scene, Franklin was “in many ways, the pioneer of the modern TV Talk Show Format,” according to his website which says he interviewed more than 300,000 guests.
Many of those became famous like Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, Bill Cosby and Liza Minnelli.
He would also interview offbeat characters that would give the Joe Franklin Show “a great uniqueness. On any given night you might find a world renown artist sitting next to a balloon folder from New Jersey,” his website said.
He is remembered as a “NYC legend” and “radio and TV icon who was the spirit of a hard-working New Yorker” by fans on Twitter. Other say his “accidental absurdism was like an Ionesco play every night” and that “Joe Franklin was every New Yorker’s oddball, congenial neighbor.”
Franklin, who was often parodied on Saturday Night Live by Billy Crystal, also played himself in films like “Manhattan,” “Ghostbusters” and “Broadway Danny Rose.”
He was an avid collector of entertainment nostalgia. His website says he had over 50,000 movie stills, 170,000 magazines, 20,000 playbills and 200,000 pieces of sheet music. Pictures show a lot of his collection was crammed in to his office.
Actress Martha Plimpton tweeted “all the best things about New York are going away. RIP Joe Franklin.”
Actor Harvey Fierstein tweeted “Joe Franklin gone!!!! Damn! He gave me my first TV exposure and I certainly wasn’t alone in that.”
And that sentiment may be his enduring legacy as comedy writer Chris Regan tweets “before YouTube, Twitter, etc., the ambitious-but-not necessarily-talented had few options. Places like The Joe Franklin Show gave them voice.”
CNN’s Joe Sutton contributed to this report.