My father worked for a company in Switzerland in the 80s and early 90s that was solely specialized in relocating buildings: either too old to be demolished due to historical value or because it was a cheaper alternative than demolishing everything and building again 10 meters to the side. He loved that work but it was very stressful and took its toll on him. I was very young but still remember seeing this old wooden church crossing the street with my father running in circles yelling to people.
I didn't see it mentioned there, so I have to ask: what about the cabling? Depending on where the telephone cables entered the building, they would have to get up to 12 meters longer. How did they make that work? Did they splice every cable? Or did the cables already have enough slack?
That depends very much on where the cables were running. Some of them will have gotten longer than needed, others shorter and for some it may not have made a big difference, merely a slight change of angle.
The phone companies deal with cable splices all the time (roughly at the rate of backhoe deployment), so they most likely shut down the trunks one-by-one, extended the ones that needed more wire and they may or may not have decided to take up the slack in the remainder (to avoid parasitic inductance and capacitance from rolling up the excess wire).
Not sure about this specific example, but here's how cutovers between exchanges were achieved at the time. A similar process was probably used: https://youtu.be/VVTzEVPz1YA (the actual cut-over procedure starts at 8:20)
This was my first thought, but I assume that they tackled this issue when they lifted the building, since keeping telephone service running during the process seems to have been the primary goal of the project. Perhaps once the building was up, they did whatever they needed to do to extend the cables.
Indianapolis has a very similar relocation story from 1930, with the 11,000-ton Indiana Bell building [1].
Fun fact: Kurt Vonnegut's father was the chief architect who recommended rotating the building [2]. Earlier than that, there was also a building that was moved by a team of horses to make way for the Indiana War Memorial, but I can't find a source anywhere (I read about it while touring the memorial).
> Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge.
Maybe this could work as a publicity stunt to persuade the general public that there is no risk, but I can't imagine that you can reassure an expert who is familiar with the actual risks by rising the stakes. (Not to mention putting his wife and child in danger for a psychological exercise)
The nervous people were the telephone workers inside the building, presumably not experts. By having having his own wife and child inside the building, the responsible engineer puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak.
This is similar to the Chinese government ordering airline executives to be on a flight on new year's eve Y2K, so they won't cut corners to save money or whatever to make the fixes required.
You are correct in that… however I think that this harkens back to "talk is cheap, actions lead." That is, it is very easy to say "this is safe" even if you don't think that it is. By putting something that you value on the line, then you are showing your level of commitment to the statement that "this is safe".
I think that you will find it is not the "technical experts" who were afraid, but the workers in the building. This is exactly the sort of action that reassures these people, since they see that you have "skin in the game". It is also worth noting that he almost certainly didn't believe that he was placing his wife and child in danger.
Why shouldn't this reassure someone who is an expert in risks? Risk comes not only from the technical and scientific aspects of an operation but also the organizational processes, compliance, and actual execution. And for those, incentives and motivations matter a lot.
Knowing his wife and child were going to be in the building, you can bet he watched the workers like a hawk and triple-checked all the work and every calculation. Without his wife and child there, it's less certain whether he was equally thorough.
Risk is something like likelihood of failure multiplied by consequences of failure. If you increase the consequences some but decrease the likelihood more, you could have a net reduction in risk.
> Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc—on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.
The cleanup of NYTS was essential in getting tourists to keep going to new york as well as make it a livable place --companies were all moving to NJ for tax and quality of life reasons.
I really do not miss all the sex shops and prostitutes, pushers and all around hustlers who used to have a run of the place. I for one am glad they cleaned that up.
Im pretty sure even with a high water table, its not as though the water would seep through if its well sealed. A lot of times they have to seal them for fire-safety
I'm surprised that they don't move more buildings - I guess it is fabulously expensive. When I was a child I remember that one local building was moved to allow a road to be widened (http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem...). I've never heard of a UK building being moved since.
Here's an even more wild example - the city of Chicago was too low to the water, causing sanitation problems. So they moved the whole city, one building at a time... about six feet straight up. With the technology of 1850-65. While most of the buildings in question were in use.
Infrastructure projects of old fascinate me. I can't imagine this being done today. Same with things like the El, NYC subways, and the Eisenhower interstate system: the amount of overhead these projects would encounter (for both better and worse) would be prohibitive.
A 12700-ton church was moved ~850m in 70s Czechoslovakia to make space for coal mining [0][1]. It wasn't in use during the move though. :)
The rest of the town was demolished, and a new one (with same name) was built nearby. Mining has stopped since and there's a giant lake in the old town's area now.
There are several videos about the event, but most of them with Czech commentary only… Still, it's interesting to at least skip around the video [2].
Aerial map of the location: https://en.mapy.cz/s/2pntC (you can switch to 19th century map via the "change map" button).
There used to be a show in the US about moving houses - generally they were wooden houses and moved a mile or so to either a new part of town or another town. I think the huge wide (and pretty empty looking) roads helped - I can't think of many cases where you'd be able to do similar in the UK due to the narrow roads.
Plus I'd rather move a wooden house than a brick or even a stone one.
It's fairly common to relocate houses in New Zealand, up to a couple of hundred km away.
Wooden buildings built on piles used to be the standard construction method in New Zealand before poured concrete bases became the norm, so they're relatively easy to move: just chop the piles and jack it up onto a truck.
My parent's friends actually gave a house away for free. They were rebuilding, it it was cheaper to give the house away for free and have the new owners pay to get it relocated, rather than pay for demolition.
It depends on a lot of factors, I imagine. I stayed with a man in Iceland who had moved a family house across town when it became his new home for himself and his family.
When materials to build a new house are phenomenally expensive, and perhaps labor expensive as well, it becomes cheaper to deal with the logistics of moving an entire dwelling intact.
