Submitted by LPercepts t3_z5fhvz in todayilearned
If it happened today it would take twelve years, six CEQA reports, and $390 million.
$390 million quoted and goes over budget by $150 million
In the first year, sure. Years 2-12 are another 150m each.
Ain't that the truth!
China moved/rotated a railway station recently I think.
It’s only the United States who’s lost the ability to construct projects rationally.
We have, however, gained the ability to do construction without killing workers left and right and leaving a trail of environmental ruin
>leaving a trail of environmental ruin
leaving as big of a trail of environmental ruin
Nope, US standards are among the highest in western world, far superior to China and India
That's not what the comment was disputing.
Do construction is pretty generous
Adjusted for inflation it's the same cost as back then
And a bunch of nimby lawsuits because rotating the building will destroy the neighborhood's character
Wait til you hear what they did to downtown chicago back in the day
The fire made moving buildings easy
Made me chuckle +1
And also to the Chicago river
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Modern marvels
Aww, I miss the History Channel.
Now you've made me sad. :(
You're not missing much, considering what passes for acceptable content there
That's not The History Channel, that's just "History."
I think the commenter meant “when the history channel wasn’t all Ancient Aliens and reality tv”
I was wondering why they would go through all that effort, but seeing as it was a telephone exchange building it makes sense that it was vital that it need to be up and running full time. Impressive feat
>but seeing as it was a telephone exchange building
That makes it even more incredible! Surely there are hundreds of connections into the building rather than just the usual gas, electricity, water.
I wonder if "no interruption" is completely literal, or whether they did need to switch some of these off for a few minutes to connect to a different pipe/cable.
The photographs of the works are crazy. Because they had to rotate the building they had to dig out a circular trench around the whole ground floor so none of the corners caught as it turned. As a consequence, the building's workers had to enter through a covered bridge that spanned between the pavement and whatever direction the building was facing at the time. For a while those workers had their own moat and drawbridge 😮
The thing that really impresses me is that they kept the telephone service providied from the building up. Thousands upon thousands of pairs of tiny wires -- one per customer telephone line -- all run into a building like that.
Water and gas too, apparently?
Well it's more impressive when you realise this building was a working telephone exchange, and this was before automatic relays, so every single telephone wire running in and out of the building had to be turned 90° and lengthened a few hundred feet without loss of service.
>The new headquarters was completed in 1932, and was seven stories tall. It was later expanded in the 1940s and 1960s to bring it to its current size and height. The original building that had been moved was demolished in 1963.[3]
FFS
Never knew they destroyed the building 😢
I would have thought that the sheer fact the building was the focus of an engineering marvel would have made it worth keeping around.
Same. I kinda have soft plans on visiting Indianapolis for the 2024 eclipse, and when I saw how close this building is to Monument Circle in the pictures I thought "oh cool, I'll go take a look at this building too!," but when I looked up the address it looked like some ugly 60s office building.
Alas.
How did they do it without any interruptions to plumbing, power, or gas?
Photo in linked page shows what appear to be large hoses. I'm guessing that's the plumbing. I don't know how they could do a cut on that without an interruption. Perhaps a quick cut over, over night, was considered acceptable, but I don't know.
Power can be run in flexible cables fairly easily, and even bridged while live if you're careful.
Gas I dunno. Presumably flexible lines of some kind, but that's not something I'm familiar with.
Pex
Nah, you don’t do gas in pex, it’s always steel
Yep, I lived in a house that had a 1911 furnace that had been converted from coal to sawdust to gas, it was plumbed with steel pipes that were only for "structural tubing" use, they weren't even legal for plumbing/water much less gas!
The look on the face of the HVAC guy who installed the new gas/electric furnace in ~2009 was hilarious, he was like "I have never seen this kind of pipe, it's not legally rated for water or gas...."
I loved that old house, lathe and plaster walls with knob and tube wiring, no grounds, The oven was from the 1950's and if you touched certain parts it would shock you.
Holy shit, my grandma's stove would always shock me and everyone called me a liar!
Thank you for vindicating me... 30 years after the house was demolished.
The replacement house was very nice, and the new stove never shocked me.
PEX wasn't in use in the US until the 1980s
I was trying to be phunny
If you're rotating a building like this 90 degrees then no doubt the plumbing, power and gas were all definitely interrupted.
Yeah but at 2am no one cares lol
Yeah well I just responded to his question. Then obviously they would have to replumb everything and do all the electrician work etc. It makes you wonder why the rotated the building, and didn't just reinstall the door on the other side.
There's a linked youtube video that shows the process. Also, that one of the architects of the move was Kurt Vonngut, Sr, the father of author Kurt Vonnegut.
Why did the son add an extra letter to the last name? Weirdos!
I'd wager that either father or son changed it during one of the World Wars due to the Germanic nature of the name.
It's a typo.
I’d love to have seen this thread play out before someone pointed out it’s a typo
It had started and I literally lol'd about it! Then there's that ONE person that just has to come along and shit on the ice cream.
So it goes.
Meanwhile I think we're going into year 12 of adding one lane to I-69 between Gas City and Bloomington Indiana
They raised an entire city block in my hometown like 100 feet because it used to flood all the time.
Which city? 100 feet is a lot.
"like" 100 feet
Knoxville Tennessee
Chicago, I believe.
You're off an order of magnitude. They raised Chicago between 4 and 14 feet
IIRC the Dunaway’s building (brick building at the corner of Virginia and east) was moved from the Lilly campus
How the hell did they do that?!
Hydraulic jacks under the foundation and rollers to actually move it.
This is amazing, especially for what they had in 1930!
Also, it sort of reminds me of those Foucault pendulums, where the pendulum moves so slowly that you can't notice it, but after a few hours, it moves quite a bit. It's sort of like that, you don't even know the building's moving, but a month later, it's been fully turned!
edit: why was I downvoted? :(
I always read this when it comes around, and thank you for another page I need to bookmark for architecture knowledge.
Brilliant engineering & stable construction. Meanwhile, just building something that doesn't loom over its neighbors is beyond current standards in San Francisco.
How shallow were the foundations?
why wouldn't they have the people inside get out of the building before doing this?
Because the building is a call exchange center. It provides an essential service to the public that those in charge did not want to be disrupted. That's why they were moving the building, rather than outright demolishing it.
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And so it went
I was reading this and thought, “wow how cool!” Then I got to “no one inside felt it move” and now I have so many questions 🤣
Whoa. And I thought it was cool when they moved the Hatteras lighthouse 2,900 feet in 1999. 😳
There are actually incidents where people moved entire houses across continents, for example from England to the USA or to Australia.
Talk about the ultimate April fool's prank
That is some pretty incredible shit. And with the limited tools of the period. America definitely blew their load early and hasn’t really done shit since the moon.
Lol this has got to the be the most commonly reposted TIL. It’s almost as if the people reposting this found out about it from a repost itself and then think “I should definitely repost this in TIL”.
Weird I've been on Reddit for like a decade and I've never seen it.
I have seen it before, but not for a few years now.
And I browse this sub every.single.day.
Reposting is fine IMO, only basement dwellers complain about reposting on reddit.
There is certainly a point where reposting is a problem.
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This has been posted about 200 times… steal something original
Let's make it 201 times then.
This has already been reposted thousands of times
Well good thing the sub is "Today I Learned" and not "Can Only Be Posted Once".
Geetright t1_ixvtj3d wrote
That's pretty amazing if it were to happen today, but 1930?? Excellent engineering!