On Call, Vol. 1, No. 3 - Physical Plant: The Set... "St. Elsewhere's Silent Co-Star"

From On Call: The Official Newsletter of the St. Elsewhere Appreciation Club, December 1997, volume 1, number 3.

She had no lines and received no on-screen credit. No one thanked her at the Emmy Awards. And when her services were no longer required, she was discarded. Yet, week in and week out for six years, she stood at the ready, and supported her fellow actors with quiet grace. Who was this MVP? ...the SET, of course.

While the supposed hospital exterior (the Franklin Square House located at East Newton in Boston) got "top billing" every week, it was the interior - the Set - that comprised the heart and soul of ST. ELIGIUS and St. Elsewhere.

STEPHEN FURST... "The rooms were very realistic - they were about the same size as a regular hospital. As soon as I put on that white coat and stethoscope, I always thought I was a doctor (laughs)."

But as with any real hospital, the Set had its problems... they were not, however, man-made.

Mark Tinker

MARK TINKER... "We were originally on Stage 9 and one day someone walked into the stage in the morning and noticed that this main truss bean was literally splitting in half, so that it was coming apart, and was going to fall. So they shored that thing up with like a 12 x 12, and that moved another foot during the night, so they said, 'Here's your choices - you gotta shut down. You can either wait while we redo the stage, and we don't know how long that's going to take, or you can tear the set down and rebuild it on Stage 3. This was show number seven in year one... I was in the middle of shooting an episode and the ceiling was going to cave in. So we said, we'll shut down, and let's rebuild. So for two weeks, 24 hours a day they reubilt the set onto Stage 3."