Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930 | Hacker News Reader

Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930

kottke.org

102 pointssogen24 comments

Pshaw! Back in 1855 we took entire blocks of downtown Chicago and raised them up 4-14 feet to make room for sewers.

https://chicagology.com/prefire/raising/

Seattle left the buildings where they were and raised the ground to what had been the 2nd floor level, creating buried tunnels underground to the old entrances[0].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground

Atlanta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta

Sacramento: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-original-street-leve...

Yeah I should have clarified. The buildings downtown could afford to be lifted to the new street level.

Homes outside of downtown that couldn't or wouldn't do the lift had to build new entrances on their upper floor. Many of these homes still exist today.

http://chicagopatterns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/damen-...

Sometimes I wonder if we were just a different type of people 100 years ago. People were standing in the balcony while it was being lifted? Going to work as normal!? Society would never tolerate such risk these days.

I would follow the money to find the answer. People aren't less risk averse, but companies are because the huge financial toll of potential litigation.

not only that we unfortunately live in a society of fraud, where our mass transit system has to resort to their cameras to prove who wasn't on a bus when a car bumps it.

Employers didn’t value the lives of their employees very much and employees lacked the power to do much about it.

Depends on the country. In a place like India or Mexico, people everywhere are doing things every day that would make headlines in the US.

An entire family of 4 riding on a single motorcycle without helmets in heavy traffic? Normal in India. Would generate new for weeks if done in the USA, parents would be arrested for child abuse.

Back in the 1990s there was a crew taking down a building on the block where I worked. Early on, they needed to remove a section of cornice so that a debris chute could drop straight. How do you cut through a concrete cornice? Well, you lean out the full-height window, hang on with one hand, and operate your jackhammer with the other. It didn't look safe to me. On the other hand, the guy was wearing a hardhat...

Going to work as normal!?

You think? I think most of them were wondering if that shit is safe. Tell me you'd work on the sixth floor thinking it's absolutely fine that you don't know the qualifications of the engineers who cooked this up, nor the odds of this going horribly wrong with you under a pile of rubble.

Or would you rather be thinking, like I imagine most of the workers were, "doesn't matter what I think, boss said if I don't get my ass to work, I'm fired. And no one wants to get fired during THE GREAT DEPRESSION."

The Wikipedia article for this, the Raising of Chicago, is one of the funniest articles on the site. I don't know exactly what makes it so funny other than how clear it is that the author had a really fun time writing about an event that seems so absurd and unbelievable.

"In January 1858, the first masonry building in Chicago to be thus raised—a four-story, 70-foot (21 m) long, 750-ton (680 metric tons) brick structure situated at the north-east corner of Randolph Street and Dearborn Street—was lifted on two hundred jackscrews to its new grade, which was 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) higher than the old one, 'without the slightest injury to the building.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

A timelapse of a building being moved in 2012 in Zurich: https://vimeo.com/42984680

It's taken from close up so you see how a concrete platform has been poured under the building, then the whole thing pushed on rails.

Banner seen at the start of the Video can be translated as "Starting May 22th this Building is going crazy.". Its a play on words that also means that the building is being moved starting May 22th.

Lubomirski Palace in Warsaw in 1970s, was also moved to line it up with a park. But it wasn't functioning during the move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubomirski_Palace,_Warsaw

The building that it was moved to construct in 1930 is still there and is still owned by AT&T - https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7713545,-86.1579046,3a,75y,2...

Very cool! My grandfather owned a house moving business. At some point, I wondered, how exactly did he do this? From what he said, pretty much as described in the article. They would put jacks under the house and lift it 1/4 inch on every corner until they could fit supports under it.

cool! do you have any pics to share or more info?

I wish I did, but I don't have much to add. He operated the business from about 1940 to 1980, so he was retired for all of my life. I imagine that my mother has some photos.

I am reminded of that Thunderbirds episode where they attempt to relocate the Empire State Building, with predictably disastrous consequences. [1]

It's interesting how in many ways, the future the show predicted was more negative than the present. It seems the hubris of man has calmed down a bit since then. Or is that the spirit of adventure? One of the two.

https://youtu.be/i4qfSrN27qo

The source that Kottke used seems like it would have been better to link to since it contains the same information and has more pictures of the move.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/10/an-incredible-move-ind...

"inch by inch 16 meters south"

Moving a building while it's in use: impressive. Switching to a different unit system in the middle of a sentence: confusing.

Yeah, yeah, people move buildings, that's a thing... Wait, what!?

>All utility cables and pipes serving the building, including thousand of telephone cables, electric cables, gas pipes, sewer and water pipes had to be lengthened and made flexible to provide continuous service during the move

Moving a building and rotating it with active gas service is incredible.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20901264

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