Where NCPR lives

If you’re in radio, you’ll say the station lives in peoples’ cars, kitchens, headsets…in the ether. If you’re part of our digital operation, you’ll say the station lives on users’ computers, hand-held devices…in the ether. But we do have a physical home. Our studios are located in the building known as the E.J. Noble Medical Building/Canton-Potsdam Hospital in Canton on Route 11.

The building has a bit of convoluted history attached to it–in a way, a story of how a community grows, changes, retrenches, changes and grows again. In the 1950s, St. Lawrence University (NCPR’s license-holder) donated land to the town of Canton for the construction of a hospital. There was one caveat: if ever the building stopped being used as a hospital, the land and building would revert to SLU’s control. In the 1970s, the Canton and Potsdam hospitals merged to become the Canton-Potsdam Hospital (CPH), and hospital functions were jointly located in the Potsdam building. The EJ Noble building in Canton was returned to SLU.

Over the next two decades, SLU rented space in the building to a variety of individual doctors and service organizations. In the early ’90s, when SLU made plans to convert Payson Hall, the campus building then occupied by NCPR, into the Admissions Office, space was found for the station in the EJ Noble building. We renovated old hospital rooms and an operating theater into a radio station. (People stopping by to visit us still say things like, “I gave birth to my first baby in your office,” or, “I had my heart surgery in your production studio.”)

The remainder of the space in the building was increasingly being used by CPH for services (like physical therapy) for which there was no longer room in the Potsdam building. A few years ago, SLU once again turned control of the building over to CPH–with the understanding that NCPR could continue to live here–as the medical needs of the Potsdam and Canton communities grew.

Now, CPH is adding onto the building, making room for more services and offices. Back in the ’70s, this turn of events probably seemed unlikely. Now, our building houses a family practice, a mental health practice, an extensive physical therapy center, diagnostic testing facilities, and us.

I went downstairs a few minutes ago to see how the work is progressing and snapped a couple of shots of the early stages of construction on the addition being built for expanded hospital services.