WGBH-TV


WGBH-TV, branded GBH 2, is a PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which also owns Boston's secondary PBS member WGBX-TV and Springfield, Massachusetts PBS member WGBY-TV, Class A Biz TV affiliate WFXZ-CD and public radio stations WGBH and WCRB in the Boston area, and WCAI radio on Cape Cod.
WGBH-TV, WGBX-TV, and the WGBH and WCRB radio stations share studios on Guest Street in northwest Boston's Brighton neighborhood; WGBH-TV's transmitter is located on Cabot Street in Needham, Massachusetts, on the former candelabra tower, which is shared with Fox affiliate WFXT and serves as a full power backup facility for sister station WGBX-TV as well as CBS owned-and-operated station WBZ-TV, ABC affiliate WCVB-TV, NBC O&O WBTS-CD, and independent station WSBK-TV.
WGBH is a prominent distributor and producer of national PBS programming, with some of its most notable programs having included American Experience, The French Chef, Frontline, Masterpiece, Nova, and ''The Victory Garden.''

History

Organization and first broadcasts (1951–1955)

The WGBH Educational Foundation received its first broadcast license for radio in April 1951 under the auspices of the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, a consortium of local universities and cultural institutions, whose collaboration stems from an 1836 bequest by textile manufacturer John Lowell, Jr. that called for free public lectures for the citizens of Boston. WGBH first signed on the air on October 6, 1951, with a live broadcast of a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The Federal Communications Commission originally awarded a construction permit to Waltham-based electronics company Raytheon to build a television station that would transmit on VHF channel 2 in Boston. Raytheon planned to launch a commercial television station using the call letters WRTB-TV. However, after some setbacks and the cancellation of the construction permit license, WRTB never made it on the air, paving the way for the FCC to allocate channel 2 for non-commercial educational use. WGBH subsequently applied for and received a license to operate on that channel. The WGBH Educational Foundation obtained initial start-up funds for WGBH-TV from the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation.
The station's callsign refers to Great Blue Hill, a location in Milton that served as the original location of WGBH-TV's transmitter facility and where the transmitter for WGBH radio continues to operate to this day.
WGBH-TV first signed on the air at 5:20 pm on May 2, 1955, becoming the first public television station in Boston and the first non-commercial television station to sign on in New England. The first program to air on the station was Come and See, a children's program hosted by Tony Saletan and Mary Lou Adams, which was filmed at Tufts Nursery Training School. Channel 2 originally served as a member station of the National Educational Television and Radio Center, which evolved into National Educational Television in 1963; for its first few years on the air, channel 2 only broadcast on Monday through Fridays between 5:30 and 9 p.m.

First studios near MIT (1956–1961)

For the first six years, operations were based out of studio facilities located at 84 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directly across from the Rogers Building main entrance to MIT. The first television studios were located in second-floor space which originally had housed a roller skating rink. The uneven and rippled maple floors caused difficulties moving the heavy TV cameras, and loud creaking noises plagued the sound engineers.
In 1957, Hartford N. Gunn Jr. was appointed general manager of WGBH; he would later earn the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Ralph Lowell Award for his achievements in programming development. Under Gunn, who would serve until February 1970, WGBH made significant investments in technology and programming to improve the station's profile, and set out to become a major producer of public television.
In February 1957, WGBH expanded its programming to weekends for the first time, adding a four-hour schedule on Sunday afternoons from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m.. In March 1958, channel 2 began offering academic instructional television programs, with the debut of eight weekly science programs aimed at students in the sixth grade, which were televised "in some 48 separate school systems in and around the Boston area". In November of that year, the station installed a new full-power transmitter donated by Westinghouse, which increased channel 2's transmitting power to 100,000 watts.

Fire and recovery (1961–1969)

During the early morning hours of October 14, 1961, a large fire devastated the Cambridge studios of WGBH-TV and WGBH radio. WGBH was only off the air for one day after the fire. Before the conflagration, WGBH had purchased a used Greyhound bus, and had begun refitting it as a mobile TV studio. It was parked behind the 84 Massachusetts Avenue building but somehow survived the disaster, and became a vital temporary facility for continued operations.
Until the WGBH Educational Foundation was able to build a new studio complex to replace the destroyed former building, the two stations arranged to operate from temporary offices, and had to produce their local programming from the studio facilities of various television stations in the Boston area and southern New Hampshire. WGBH-TV maintained a splintered operation, basing its master control operations at Newman Catholic Center at Boston University, production facilities at the studios of then CBS affiliate WHDH-TV on Morrissey Boulevard in Boston's Dorchester section, and its film and tape library was housed at the studios of fellow NET station WENH-TV in Durham, New Hampshire.
Several area universities also chipped in to temporarily house other operations displaced by the fire: WGBH's scenic department was relocated to Northeastern University, its arts department was set up on the Boston University campus, and programming and production offices were based in Cambridge's Kendall Square neighborhood. WHDH, NBC affiliate WBZ-TV and ABC affiliate WNAC-TV also provided technical and production assistance to the WGBH television and radio stations until a permanent facility was built to reintegrate the stations' operations.
On August 29, 1963, WGBH-TV and WGBH radio both began operating from a new studio facility for the stations that was built at 125 Western Avenue in Boston's Allston neighborhood.
On June 18, 1966, WGBH-TV relocated its transmitter to a broadcast tower in Needham, Massachusetts, The following year on September 25, 1967, WGBH-TV gained a sister television station in the Boston area, WGBX-TV, which has transmitted its signal from the Needham site since the station signed on. WGBX's digital signal on UHF channel 32 shares the master antenna at the very top of the tower with several commercial stations in the market, while WGBH-TV's channel 5 digital transmitter operates from a different tower on Cabot St, also in Needham.
The launch of WGBX was one facet of a plan developed by the WGBH Educational Foundation in the late 1960s to operate a network of six non-commercial television stations around Massachusetts. However, these plans never materialized in their intended form; besides WGBX, the only other station that ultimately made it on the air was WGBY in Springfield, which launched in 1971. Three additional WGBH-owned stations were to have launched, all of which were slated to use the letters "WGB" for the first three letters in their callsigns; these included WGBW, which was to broadcast on channel 35 in Adams, along with two stations in New Bedford and Worcester.
On the night of April 5, 1968, WGBH-TV broadcast a James Brown concert from the Boston Garden, the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Boston Mayor Kevin White, who was worried that the concert would set off a riot, and certain that cancellation would be worse, contacted WGBH to air the concert on TV, and told the public to stay home and watch, helping prevent boycotts in the region. The concert would later be seen numerous times in the following days, helping the Boston area stay in peace.

PBS membership and expansion (1970–2006)

In 1970, longtime WGBH general manager Hartford N. Gunn Jr. resigned, to become founding President of the Public Broadcasting Service. This new organization was launched as an independent entity to supersede NET and assumed many of the functions of its predecessor network. WGBH itself joined the new network. Over time, WGBH became a pioneer in public television, producing many programs that were seen on NET and later, PBS, that either originated at the station's studio facilities or were otherwise produced by channel 2.
On October 31, 2003, WGBH launched Boston Kids & Family TV, a PBS Kids Channel-affiliated local cable service that was developed in partnership with the City of Boston. Available to Comcast and RCN subscribers, the service took over channel space previously occupied by one of the city's cable access channels, which carried a mix of public affairs programs, footage of city-sponsored events, and mayoral press conferences. Boston Kids & Family carried a mix of children's programs produced by WGBH and other distributors—which were scheduled to avoid simulcasts with WGBH-TV or WGBX-TV—daily from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and a repeating block of telecourse programs aimed at adults from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. The channel intended to affiliate the subchannel with the planned PBS Kids Go! network, which was scheduled to launch in October 2006; however, PBS scuttled plans to launch the Kids Go! network prior to its launch. After PBS Kids ceased network operations, Boston Kids & Family was replaced by The Municipal Channel, which carried much of the programming offered by the service prior to the WGBH partnership.
As WGBH's operations grew, the 125 Western Avenue building proved inadequate to support it and its sister stations; some administrative operations were moved across the street to 114 Western Avenue, with an overhead pedestrian bridge connecting the two buildings. By 2005, WGBH had facilities in more than a dozen buildings in the Allston area. The station's need for more studio space dovetailed with Harvard Business School's desire to expand its adjacent campus; Harvard already owned the land on which the WGBH studios were located, which the university had donated to WGBH for use to construct the Western Avenue facility in 1962 at a value of $250,000.