Originally published in Current, Feb. 25, 2002
By Steve Behrens

With Harvard University expanding its Cambridge campus into Boston, WGBH plans to move out of the way by 2005. The station, whose people are now scattered in a dozen buildings, announced this month that it will consolidate in a new complex in the modest-income residential neighborhood of Brighton, not far from its present digs.

WGBH, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, will buy a new seven-story office building, expanding its own floor space from 260,000 to 300,000 square feet, and build a studio facility across the street with room for further growth, according to Andrew S. Griffiths, chief financial officer.

The new site will accommodate the largest staff in pubcasting, now more than 1,000 full-timers, which has grown steadily as the institution added new services on top of its production portfolio that includes one-third of the PBS primetime schedule.

Griffiths says he's been trying to project its annual growth for 21 years and has underestimated 20 times. Last year was the exception--station revenues dropped about 5 percent.

"I always thought we have peaked, and that's still my gut instinct," Griffiths says, referring to public TV's uphill battle for funding. "I see tight times ahead," he says. "Our growth has come from doing new things and finding new funding sources."

The station has not only added hit ongoing series such as Arthur and Antiques Road Show, but also expanded its media access work for vision- and hearing-impaired audiences and its online and print projects.

Revenues more than tripled in the 1980s and doubled in the 1990s, to $215 million in 2000. Full-time staffing nearly kept up over the two decades, rising from 180 to 1,000.

In Brighton, WGBH will adjoin the new headquarters of New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc., one of the latest generation of businesses to grow up in Brighton and Allston. Honeywell once made computers there, and decades earlier Swift & Co. and other meatpackers maintained the nation's largest stockyards there, according to Joe Anderson, retired v.p. of operations at WGBH. (The present Caption Center site once held a very large fertilizer plant, he says.)

The station has signed to buy the largely vacant new midrise at Market and Guest Streets and already owns two acres across Guest Street, where it will have studios and expansion space, according to Griffiths. Now it can plan how to use the space. "This next year is going to be a time of thinking," he says. The station will move in stages, finishing in 2005, according to station spokeswoman Jeanne Hopkins.

WGBH did not disclose the price, but in Boston's soft real estate market, it may have been a good one. The economy is right for the move, Griffiths says. "We can borrow money at the lowest interest rates we've seen in a long time, and most importantly we can buy property in the area at a price we could not have bought a year ago."

Last week a state agency, Mass Development, approved financing for the project through the sale of tax-exempt bonds, Griffiths says. The amount has not yet been nailed down. The station's capital campaign, which raised $43 million by last spring, will pay for some digital equipment but is not intended to cover the new facility, Hopkins says.

An alternative was to build taller buildings on its land, according to Griffiths, but the station would find itself in the middle of Harvard's expanding campus.

"This was the time to strike a deal with Harvard," says Griffiths. The university, which does its planning on a long timetable, believes it is entering a growth century, he says. It's cramped in nearby Cambridge and wants its land back so that it can expand further into Boston from its Business School beachhead on the Charles River. Harvard owns land completely surrounding the station and underneath its main building at 125 Western Ave. in Allston. Half of WGBH's space is rented from the university. WGBH also owns about five acres, which it wants to sell to the university.

Even before it became its tenant, WGBH had close ties to Harvard. The area's major universities helped found the station and hold five seats on its board. When the station's old Cambridge headquarters in a remodeled roller-skating rink burned down in 1961, Harvard came to the rescue by offering land on Western Avenue. WGBH moved there in 1965. To please the locals, according to Anderson, it sometimes aired the local ID, "WGBH Allston."

Model shows the future WGBH headquarters (center) at the edge of the Massachusetts Turnpike in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. The site of a studio building, yet to be built, is at right.

The new building in the Brighton Landing complex is less than two miles from WGBH's present home. Next door to the right: New Balance shoes.

	To Current's home page
	Later feature: Public TV stations across the country are building new facilities while they prepare to go digital.
	Outside link: Timeline of WGBH history on the station's site.

Web page posted Jan. 19, 2003
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