In 1930, the 22M-pound Indiana Bell building was rotated 90 degrees | Hacker News Reader

In 1930, the 22M-pound Indiana Bell building was rotated 90 degrees

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178 pointsrwmj76 comments

Fun fact: the building's architect was Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., the father of the famous author. Indiana Bell wanted the building demolished to make room for a larger HQ building, but Vonnegut's idea was to move the building out of the way instead [0].

"Between Oct. 12 and Nov. 14 1930 the eight-story 11,000-ton Indiana Bell building was shifted 52 feet south along Meridian St. and rotated 90 degrees to face New York St. Workmen used a concrete mat cushioned by Oregon fir timbers 75-ton, hydraulic jacks and rollers, as the mass moved off one roller workers placed another ahead of it. Every six strokes of the jacks would shift the building three-eights of an inch - moving it 15 inches per hour."

"Gas, electric heat, water and sewage were were maintained to the building all during the move. The 600 workers entered and left the traveling structure using a sheltered passageway that moved with the building. The employees never felt the building move and telephone service went on without interruption. And yes, the move took less than 30 days. It remains one of the largest buildings ever moved. The building was demolished in 1963."

0: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0...

> demolished in 63!

After all that? FFS

Put another way, by doing this, they managed to get another 33 years of useful life out of the building before its inevitable demolition.

Put anothernother way, the structural integrity was sus following such an enormous move and eventually leveler heads won out after Kurt Vonnegut Senior died in 1957 (in Indianapolis).

Is this conjecture or fact?

A bell building like that almost certainly housed a large telephone exchange. Demolishing the building and then building a new one would likely require a temporary exchange to be installed somewhere else. Moving the existing building, and keeping it operating during the move, then building the new building would make it possible to transition the circuits to new exchanges built inside the new building with a minimum of downtime over the next 33 years.

And probably an entire floor or more of the building was dedicated to flooded lead/acid batteries for uninterrupted power to the telephone network.

Indeed, sadly that is mostly gone and buried now. Before the phone company was basically completely responsible for keeping your phone working.

Now keeping your phone working requires both parties, the vendor and the customer to keep stuff happy to make the phone work.

Yes I've visited the battery banks in make exchanges in the Netherlands in the early 2000s. Phone exchange equipment runs on 48V DC for this reason. I've even been to relay-based phone exchanges that still existed in those days, though they were rare. Pulse only. It was weird being in a dark building sounding like it was infested by crickets. Really spooky.

Why make stuff up?

It was build in 1907. So instead of getting demolished ~23 years later it was done when it was ~56 years old. Quite a win.

The original was the Central Union Telephone Company building and the one moved to make way for the new building which was built by Vonnegut. The original building was demolished in 1963. The Vonnegut building is still there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Building_(Indianapolis)

Reminds me of a recent story in New York in which a Broadway theater was raised 30 feet. The owner of the building wanted to put commercial space on the ground floor, but the theater itself was on the ground floor and protected. So the solution was to raise the theater above the ground floor. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/business/palace-theater-t...

"During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the level of central Chicago to lift it out of low-lying swampy ground. Streets, sidewalks, and buildings were physically raised on jackscrews."

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

Same deal in Seattle. Small parts of "the underground" remained in use for decades, including as speakeasies during Prohibition, but nowadays it's only tourist thing (but pretty cool nonetheless)

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

A little different, though. No buildings were raised in Seattle, they just built the roads higher (12-30 feet) and bridged the old sidewalks. Second floor became first floor.

That's funny: I swear a Seattle architect designed the building I live in because the ground floor is floor 2. It also skips floor 13.

I went on the Seattle Underground tour, it was really interesting, strongly recommended. The website has more history [1]:

"(Bill) Speidel ultimately did find the remains of the city consumed in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, a town founded on mostly soggy tideflats whose streets would, whenever the rains came, bloat deep enough with mud to consume dogs and small children. After the fire, which destroyed some 25 square blocks of mostly wooden buildings in the heart of Seattle, it was unanimously decided that all new construction must be of stone or brick masonry. The city also decided to rise up from the muck in which its original streets lay. It was this decision that created the Underground: The city built retaining walls, eight feet or higher, on either side of the old streets, filled in the space between the walls, and paved over the fill to effectively raise the streets, making them one story higher than the old sidewalks that still ran alongside them."

[1] http://www.undergroundtour.com/about/history.html

I’ve never heard of this. Incredibly fun fact!

Years earlier in 1905, the University of Iowa moved it's Science Building to a new location, off the famous Pentacrest park to its current location across the street. It had to be turned to pass through the neighboring buildings, then turned back to its final location on a foundation prepared.

Here's an article (a pdf, not a web page)

https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/ihi/article/id/1547/download/pdf/

An inspiring reminder that lots of crazily monumental (pun intended) things are technically possible if only you actually want them to happen and willing to spend money on it.

P.S. "22 million pounds"? That's approximately 22 thousand half-tons or 11 thousand tons in sensible units. Then again, we're still measuring disk sizes in half-kibibytes by default even though the sector sizes have actually been 4/8 KiB for years...

When you word it that way, it doesn't sound as impressive.. I've seen many 20k ton objects move large distances.. they are trains :)

And 25 years earlier in 1905, 6000 ton Calvin Hall was moved on the Iowa campus in a similar way. It was a well-understood technique by 1930.

Probably had a bunch of domain knowledge left over from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Are they? I vaguely recollect freight trains' weight being in the vicinity of 6-8 thousand tons, not in the twenty thousands. How long would such a train be, 200 boxcars or something? Seems a bit unwieldy.

This link [1] says the median US train is 5,400 feet, and this link [2] quotes an intermodal railcar for 53-foot containers at 67 feet, 9 inches; although 40 foot containers are the most common size; let's use 60 feet as a round number car length; that would put the median train at 90 cars; the 90%ile train is 9,800 feet or 163 cars by my length estimate, and 99%ile was 14,000 feet or 233 cars.

Probably depends on the specific route, but 200 cars doesn't seem unrealistic.

[1] https://www.aar.org/article/freight-train-length/ [2] https://www.mrc-rail.com/railcar-results/intermodal/

They are unwieldy and because of their length they're now too long for the sidings constructed to allow trains to pass each other causing scheduling issues. The whole rail industry in the US is slowly choking itself to death on it's own short term profit motives.

Many of them even float... Referring to ships that are next size up.

For further reading, I found this [0]. 20000T happens, but seems to be on the top end and not a typical train.

[0] https://www.trainconductorhq.com/how-much-does-a-train-weigh...

Capital T is tesla, a unit of magnetic flux density.

very important comment /s

Old habits die hard. I still occasionally see some engineering veterans who use the capital letter "S" for seconds (and they would write "nS" instead of "ns" for nanoseconds) - even in chip datasheets. And when I was reading a textbook one day, I also noticed that the author, an expert with a life career at Bell Labs, just couldn't write MHz properly, and instead wrote "Mhz".

In their time, Siemens and Hertz had not even been added to the SI system yet, I imagine they would speak in terms of mhos and megacycles back then.

At least mhos and megacycles are unambiguous, unlike S or T.

Another commenter mentioned T is teslas, seems like the abbreviation for a ton depends on which ton you are talking about (wikipedia lists several and not all of them are mass/weight!).

From a conversion the article uses I believe they are using the metric ton (aka megagram) which abbreviates to the lower case t. The article you reference does not seem to ever abbreviate 'ton' and I suspect that may have been done intentionally to avoid running into this issue? Its what I would have done, anyway.

I don't think this impacts the readability of your comment I just thought it was a shame that the other comment didnt go all the way and attempt to describe correct useage.

For comparison, the Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez a couple years back has a capacity just short of 200,000 tons.

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

Kinda blows my mind that it floats on water.

It's basically thanks to the fact that the water under the ship is ~870 times more dense than the air inside the ship.

The correct answer in metric is 9.98 Gg (gigagrams).

> we're still measuring disk sizes in half-kibibytes by default

Where do you see that? Marketing and operating systems always measure disk sizes in bytes (or KB, KiB, MB, etc.), not sectors. Only in low-level tools like some hex editors and disk partitioners do I see data measured in sectors.

> the sector sizes have actually been 4/8 KiB for years

512-B sectors for hard drives and flash drives, yes. But I'm too young to recall whether older hard and floppy disks had varying sector sizes. I can say, though, that CD's sector size is either 2048 bytes (data mode), 2324 bytes (XA), or some other value in other modes.

> Where do you see that?

Precisely where you've described; I've also seen "du" use it once, although it normally uses 1 KiB blocks (one of the very few things that I agree with rms on).

> 512-B sectors for hard drives and flash drives,

They've been using 4 KiB sectors since 2011; the 512-bytes sectors are emulated in the controller: [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

> The correct answer in metric is 9.98 Gg (gigagrams).

10 gigagrams. It's a rough estimate of 500 tons per story.

But tonne is a perfectly good "unit officially accepted for use with the SI". If you're willing to use "minute" and "liter" you should be fine with tonne.

Older SCSI HDDs allowed you to format them with whatever sector size you wanted. Sector sizes that were greater than 512 bytes were not uncommon.

This is the quickest (indirect) reference I could find:

https://linux.die.net/man/8/sg_format

Chicago just did one of these moves last year. To move an old building out of the way for new red line track. https://news.wttw.com/2021/08/04/time-lapse-video-cta-moves-...

They did that one in only two days!

Here's another from about 10 years ago; they moved a mansion and its coach house to another block on the street to make room for a basketball arena. Impressive that they squeezed it into a tiny city lot, and saved the tree in the (new) backyard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVEgXkbiTaE

And yet today we can't update a tag on a Lambda without something going wrong.

This article (and the included video) has a bit more detail for those interested in the mechanics of how they accomplished the move (like me!): https://www.archdaily.com/973183/the-building-that-moved-how...

This is more common than it might seem.[0][1][2][3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation

[1] https://tvpworld.com/41981555/lubomirski-palace-moved-to-new...

[2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/hea...

[3] https://untappedcities.com/2014/08/22/8-historic-buildings-t...

Most of these aren't housing telecom infrastructure, or performing downtime-less patchovers!

This feat is far more impressive than you're giving credit.

This[1] is a great video on the topic of cutovers. Not quite downtime-less, but seriously impressive little amount of downtime in any case.

[1] https://youtu.be/saRir95iIWk

That 8000 ton building at Fell & Franklin? It wasn't built there.

https://hoodline.com/2015/06/newton-j-tharp-school/ https://www.opensfhistory.org/osfhcrucible/2021/02/28/the-jo...

Indiana Bell Building was rotated 90° while everyone inside still worked in1930 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30544635 - March 2022 (2 comments)

In 1930 the Indiana Bell building was rotated 90° - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29441670 - Dec 2021 (122 comments)

In 1930 the Indiana Bell Telephone Building was rotated 90 degrees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26534718 - March 2021 (2 comments)

Indiana Bell Building Move (Of 1930) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26530546 - March 2021 (9 comments)

Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468788 - Nov 2019 (24 comments)

Rotating the Indiana Bell Building (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20901264 - Sept 2019 (5 comments)

Moving buildings, not just rotating them, is not that unusual.

In fact, there's a building I know of that was moved, people changed their mind soon after, and then they moved it again.

Once it was a mansion that reportedly belonged to Leland Stanford (you west coasters might have heard of him), later a nursing home, and finally a bank. It was in the way of a Wal-Mart and other development.

This page says that one of the moves was 350 feet:

https://www.wolfehousebuildingmovers.com/news/moving-ingerso...

A rail depot in Ohio was moved 1000 feet:

https://www.wolfehousebuildingmovers.com/news/wolfe-moves-cs...

A gas station is claimed to have been relocated 1.5 miles in three hours:

https://www.wolfehousebuildingmovers.com/news/historic-phila...

(This is not an endorsement of the company and I'm not affiliated with them; I just found their page by looking for the mansion)

What a marvel of engineering! I find it amazing that it could be done almost 100 years back. I didn’t think technology was so advanced back then.

Don’t the pillars of the building go deep into the land? How were able to lift the whole building with the pillars that buried so deep?

Reminds me of the raising of Chicago, which happened in the 1850's

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

And here you are, a similar stunt performed in China.

https://nitter.net/historyinmemes/status/1648843533116137472...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/04/when-the-indiana-bell-bu...

How did they get under the foundations of the building in order to move it?

You don't move the foundation, you move the building.

How do you get in between the foundations and the building to lift it?

I'm not sure about the construction of this building in particular -- but generally speaking you support the building from an alternative location under it, then you can lift it off the foundation.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/93/cd/bb/93cdbbe7117f16e89c74e4909...

break through at several strategic points where the building meets the foundation and place hydraulic jacks in the voids. Once enough jacks are in place and lifted, _they_ now serve as the support; the remaining parts of the building can be removed/disconnected from the original foundation.

Thanks for the explanation. This is on a much smaller scale but shows what you’ve described:

https://youtu.be/Qnr5v0farM0

To give a more concrete answer: you dig under a small section of footing. Small enough that the footing itself bridges the load across the gap. Then you install your first support element between the remaining undisturbed soil and the footing. Now that section is supported just as it was before, but by a jack, strut, wheel truck, or whatever instead of soil. Rinse and repeat until all the soil is gone.

For larger internal spans you usually install bracing elements like trusses or I-beams. This is done in a similar way: you hollow out a narrow strip, install the truss/beam, then that gives you enough leeway to continue digging on either side of it until you reach the location for the next truss/beam. Shims are used to ensure solid contact all along the length. The trusses/beams are anchored to the support elements.

At any one time only a very small part of the building's foundation is "floating" and unsupported.

Actually moving the building varies based on its size, weight, and other factors. You'd usually jack up the whole building to make room for the trucking elements which might be independently steerable wheels, one or more semi-trailers, or whatever. Then you lower the building onto the trucking element and it becomes a really big vehicle or trailer that you slowly and carefully move.

At the destination you usually pour new footings and/or piers in the same pattern as the original support elements so your truck bits can just drive right into place. Then you again just jacks to lift the building off the truck elements, move them out, then lower the building onto the new footings.

This is very simplified. A lot of engineering goes into making sure the building moves as a single piece without too much flexing (vertically or horizontally) and that the "road" it moves on can support the weight.

This may look cute, but you should know that buildings only do this when they are extremely distressed. If you see a building rotating, no matter how slowly, do not approach it!

This may happen https://youtu.be/yHp4Wi2d6BQ

Things people do for Vaastu Compliance! /jk

Distance per time seems like a very poor choice of unit for something that's roughly rotating about one corner of itself.

True, but radians or degrees are general more abstract.

"0.24 degrees per hour" (assuming 12 work hours per day) just doesn't really ring to me... and I have a mechanical engineering degree.

It gets worse when you call it 14.4 (arc) minutes per hour.

Ignoring the ‘arc’, that’s dimensionless. You could just call it “0.24” ;-)

I guess it depends on how you do the ignoring. "minutes" by itself usually means "minutes of hour", but I would argue that if you take "minutes of arc" and ignore the "arc" the better answer is "minutes of ____"

Picture an analog clock and it can be 0.008 hours/hour... about one percent of an hourhand's movement.

measuring degrees doesn't seem useful anyways, because it is not the rotating speed that is impressive but the speed against the ground at the outer edge.

I would guess it's the length of the outermost arc, sort of makes sense with the relation to employees inside not noticing it.

It was not only rotated, but also shifted: „was shifted 52 feet south“

Let's find the 2D (3x3) translation matrix for this.

For angle representation, better use gradians because radians and degrees are too easy.

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