The Building Formerly Known as Edison

 

John C. Barlow

 

 

 

At any school whose campus consists of multiple buildings, each building may stand out for a particular reason that’s academically special to the student populace. For example, one building could be the “literary building”, housing the school’s library, and English department, while another building could be the “science building” containing all the laboratories and Science departments. If one were to take a tour of Emerson College in Boston, they would see that the Walker Building on 120 Boylston Street contains the school’s library filled with students studying, and preparing themselves for class. Since it’s also where most of the classes take place in, there’s a traffic jam of students stuffing themselves into the stairs, and parking themselves in the hallway right by the doors that lead them to their next classes. The Walker Building could be considered the literary building, based on these descriptions. If they were to go to the area near Washington Street, they might come across a giant neon sign that says “Paramount”.w Located on 44 Charles Street, this building, even though it’s far from Emerson, is also a part of the college. It contains costume rooms, rehearsal spaces, and a sound stage, not to mention that it’s also part of the theater that it’s connected to, so it’s the Theater Building.

 

If they were to go back where they came from, but didn’t go back to Boylston, but were to go inside the building that had music blaring out of the speakers of its entrance, they would enter the Ansin Building. Located on 180 Tremont Street, is the technology building. Ansin houses many editing studios, screens, radio stations, and recording studios for the Visual Media Arts and Journalism majors. Today, the Ansin Building is the most technologically imperative building to the students at Emerson College. Henceforth, it’s very important to the student populace, but what’s funny is that, even though buildings at schools can seem important, not many students, whether individually or collectively, know a lot about the history of the buildings and how they came to be what they are today. Ansin has a very interesting history behind it that doesn’t seem to be talked about much today. If the students of today knew how Emerson was able to expand itself across Boylston Street, and add another building to its ever-growing campus, they would know to appreciate it more.

 

When the Ansin Building was first built on 180 Tremont Street, it used to be a part of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, and was initially built to expand that company. This was in 1932; around the same time that Emerson started to teach their students how to do radio announcements. Sometimes, students would be taken off campus into this building, so that they could use the equipment that was available there, and get hands-on experience with the radio. Eventually, these classes started taking place in a separate building located at 130 Beacon Street. During this time, Emerson was able to obtain broadcasting licenses for the radio and go beyond just sending radio broadcasts to the student body. Now, they were able to reach out to the city at large. Today, WERS (Emerson’s Radio Station) functions from the Ansin building, and is considered to be one of the best college radio station in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.

 

For the last couple of decades, Emerson has been updating and upgrading the way that they teach their classes, and trying to make sure that their education fits with the current student body’s political beliefs. Emerson was suffering from some financial problems in the 80’s when they were feeling the pressure to move their Back Bay campus to another location. They had ownership over some of the theater districts, including the Cutler Majestic Theatre, and according to Christina Zamon, who works at the archives in the Walker Building, the city “wanted to ‘clean up’ the old theater district and restore it and since Emerson already owned the Majestic Theatre it made sense to find buildings nearby.” Ever since Emerson bought the Ansin Building back in 1992, they were able to fulfill the city’s wishes, and keep operating the theater buildings they have ownership of. “Without the purchase of the Ansin building Emerson would not be where it is today, ... Buying the Ansin building was a leap of faith that paid off in the long run.  Had we not purchased the Ansin building who knows where Emerson would be located today” (Zamon).

Ansin is also the home of a lot of editing suites, and film students who are very unfamiliar with editing can then learn about editing software like Premiere Pro, Final Cut, Adobe Photoshop, etc. Since it’s become such a landing ground for Visual Media Arts majors, both the broadcasting and film majors seemed to have coalesced into each other to produce a couple of after school groups like the Emerson Channel. Most student run activities like Emerson Independent Video take place in the Ansin Building, due to its resources in space, technology, and editing suites.

Walking into the Ansin Building today tells you everything you need to know about it, without any historical context. Looking through the windows, one can see multiple recording studios covered in traditional, Emersonian purple walls. Walk into the building, past the double doors, past the security guard, past the elevators, and you’ll get the film editing suites. In the digital age today, students edit on computers, so you will see a lot of students on these computers. Editing in these rooms is either a cooperative learning experience, or a solitary working experience, as the students are allowed to come in at any time they please, before the room closes at 10:00 P.M, to edit any work that they have.

 

The building contains real film stock as well. This stock is mostly used for classes that use a Dark Room where they work with negatives, and experience the creation of photography physically, rather than the usual digital creation of it. The floor also has the experimental class where people create pieces by painting onto film stock, going through the celluloid one frame at a time, which takes much longer than creating something by shooting at twenty-four frames per second. This is much higher up, on the sixth floor. Going into these rooms of stock, you see rolling bins of film coming out at loose ends, like a collection of paper just thrown together in a bag. This is the lesser-documented part of the building.

 

Without the Ansin Building, and all its equipment to offer the wide-eyed and ambitious students of Emerson, the film students wouldn’t be able to go bring back the footage they recorded of the world and edit it in a professional way. The journalism students would also be without the radio station, which could be seen as the gold inside the treasure chest that they want to obtain. These resources have helped students in going out into the world, and finding, or creating stories that can give the common-folk better insight into the world. People often say that technology is supposed to bring us together, and stay in touch with one another, but it only ends up distancing people even more. This is true to a certain extent, but digital research is not an individual task. These students collaborate by bringing their cameras, and their sound recorders with them to take in what they see in the world, and share that with the rest of Emerson and Boston. Emerson students have gone out and found ways to document events, and report them back to the world competently enough as any news station would without the prestige of a popular news Station at that. Film students have been able to turn footage they have recorded on set, and piece it together into a creative story with their film editing software like a sculptor creating a statue with a hammer and chisel. All of this wouldn’t have been possible if the Ansin Building didn’t become a part of Emerson.

 

A bit about John 

 

John Barlow is a First-Year Visual Media Arts major at Emerson College. His hobbies include watching movies, listening to music, and playing solitaire. Before going to Emerson, he took a Post-Graduate year at Interlochen, a boarding school in Michigan, to prepare himself for the filmmaking courses at Emerson.