Emerson College President Lee Pelton has said purchasing some, if not, all of MassDOT’s Boston office building, which is located off a side street just down the road from Boston Common, is something the school might be interested in.

In fact, Pelton told the Boston Globe that pursuing the building, 10 Park Plaza, as a part of a campus expansion, would be “highly desirable.”

MassDOT’s office is tucked in a back alleyway, behind – when it’s closed – a tall black gate, off Charles Street. Admittedly, it’s quite nice.

How nice? According to Boston assessing data, 10 Park Plaza carries a property value of $121 million. The eight-story-tall building houses a total of 850,000 square feet of office, ground-floor retail space, and parking, the Globe reports.

In speaking with the Globe, Pelton admitted that any acquisition or major lease-signing is still a few years aways. Emerson College already rents out portions of the building; on top of that, the Transportation Department could very well be gearing up to sell the building. Because it needs the money – a lot of it.

But MassDOT isn’t going to pull the trigger just yet. “We haven’t even started that process,” MassDOT spokesperson Cyndi Roy Gonzalez told the Globe. “I’m sure that when and if we decide that’s the route we want to go, it’ll be a pretty hot piece of land for people in the development industry.”

Gonzalez did, however, admit selling 10 Park Plaza – not necessarily to Emerson – would “definitely be something that we’re exploring.”

It’s still unclear how much a potential purchase of the building would cost the college. It would, no doubt, be “very expensive,” Pelton told the Globe.

Emerson College has more than 4,000 combined undergrad and graduate students, with a total of 460 full- and part-time faculty. The college is currently in the middle of a mammoth expansion already; one such project, set to break ground in May 2015, just so happens to call for an 18-story dorm built at 1-3 Boylston. That’s located…

…pretttyyyyy preeeettttttttyyyy, close to MassDOT’s building.

Photo via John Phelan/CC BY 3.0