Research and Writing

The Wandering Bark

On January 30, 2008 A research group called “The Wandering Bark” went exploring in The Sawyer building located at 8 Ashburton Place in Boston Massachusetts. The Wandering Bark consists of three members; Dave, Caroline, and Greg. After debating what the most interesting and mysterious aspect of the Sawyer building was the group decided on the stairway less traveled. This stairway exists on the backside of Sawyer and is rarely used by the majority of students. More common ways of transportation in this building are through crowded elevators and the front stairwell. The front stairwell is known for possessing a traffic scheme similar to the Mass Pike Labor Day weekend.

If students were only aware of the stairwell less traveled they would be spared of frustration and wasted time. The Wandering Bark began exploration from the start; the second floor and all the way till its end on the eleventh floor and returned down to the second floor once more. At first sight this stairwell is anything but modern, the railings are wood with a coating of dust, the drab light purple paint is chipped, and the gap between the banister (the hollow core of stairs where one can usually peer down till the stairwells end floor is in sight) is much smaller than others. Each floor in the back stairwell seems to serve as an "everything drawer" for Suffolk University, the group found old desks, chairs, rusted paint cans, brooms, and boxes. If one can’t find a place to store something in Sawyer it’s likely it will be thrown with the mass of random objects to this back stairwell.

On each floor in the back stairwell there are fire hoses and smoke alarms. If one were to walk a bit further away from the stairs they would come across locked doors with numbered pad locks. These doors appear to have once been labeled with informative name plates which are now nowhere to be found. On the sixth floor the group was able to find labels on these name plates that read, “Health Department,” however after a thorough search no doctors or anything health related could found. One artifact discovered behind boxes was a pornographic magazine dated back from October 2007. This artifact served as a fact that this stairwell has at least been used in the last year. To the common observer, the back stairwell at the Sawyer Business school building appears to be, and unless renovations take place, will remain the ghost stairwell of Suffolk University.