Fred A. Norcross (1871-1929) conducted a prolific 34-year career as a designer and architect in Boston, beginning with the rebuilding of Boston's tenement neighborhoods in the North and West Ends and the North Slope of Beacon Hill. Between 1907 and 1929, Norcross's apartment commissions were concentrated in three areas: the Fenway, Brookline, and Brighton. For a seven-year period (1907 to 1914), Norcross provided blueprints for the proliferation of apartments along the eastern border of the Fens. His designs dominate the streetscapes of Westland Avenue and Hemenway Street.

Norcross typically used a standard apartment form of five stories with polygonal bays. Interior doorways abounded so that all rooms (excluding the bathroom) possessed two doorways: one leading to the adjoining room and the other exiting onto the public stair mall. The brick tenement aesthetic of Norcross and his peers is a synthesis of influences which include: the cumulative effects of tenement reform legislation; the continuity of older, local building forms; and the mass production of architectural elements. A Norcross tenement typically consists of a glazed brick, flat-facade, side-passage row house elaborately ornamented with cast stone details and crowned with a heavy pressed-metal cornice. Norcross embellished entrances and ground floor windows with stained glass transoms (a signature element throughout his career), while upper floors were uniformly outfitted with one-over-one sash windows.

Light-colored, glazed brick facades (buff, gray, yellow, and light orange) are common throughout the North Slope and to a lesser extent the North End. There are several explanations for the turn-of-the-century popularity of this building material. It has been suggested that light-colored bricks were less expensive than red bricks; however, the universal confinement of this material to street facades debunks this theory. Beaux Arts architects favored light-colored brick facades for their visual resemblance to stone masonry construction.... With Norcross and his peers at the vanguard in their use of colored brick, this treatment rapidly became associated with tenement districts. The city's elite favored red brick used in conjunction with the popular Colonial and Federal revival styles.

In 1919 the President and Trustees of the university concluded that the institution, then located in Copley Square, "must look for a permanent location with reference to the future development of the city of Boston and the University's position therein." After a year's search a committee of the Trustees decided that the most desirable site was where the Charles River Campus is now located. Boston University purchased the land stretching from Granby Street to the Boston University Bridge in 1920. The entire property was under building restrictions and could not be used for business; hence it could be bought for half what it might otherwise have cost (the total cost was $1,672,969.50). The move from Copley Square was gradual, and the new College of Liberal Arts building was unfinished when the 1947-48 academic year opened in the new location.

The History Department was initially located at 236 Bay State Road (now the English Department). History was on the second floor front and occupied what had apparently been two separate apartments. The Philosophy Department and a section of the Government Department occupied the second floor rear. Ednamae Storti (who provided information on the earliest days on the Charles River Campus) was hired by Professor Warren Ault in September of 1948 and continued at the department until October of 1957. She was the first full-time support staff member. Before she was hired, any department administrative business was handled by Prof. Ault's teaching fellow, a Mrs. Florence Petherick. A few years after Ms. Storti left, the department moved to its present location, 226 Bay State Road.

Over the years the building at 226 Bay State (corner of Granby) has had many occupants: When it was still an apartment building, the fifth floor was renovated for the use of retired BU President Daniel Marsh. The History Department moved into the space in which he had lived as well as the two floors below it. Once the building was converted to use for offices, its occupants included Professor Elizabeth Barker's Metropolitan College evening program in English, the Department of Economics, and departments of the School of Management.

The American and New England Studies Program occupied space in the building at the time that program was founded in 1970 and, after moving to 725 Commonwealth Avenue for a while, returned to 226 Bay State Road, now occupying the basement, the first, and part of the second floors.