Rather than tear down a 19th-century house on Adelaide to make way for a condo, contractors came up with another plan: just move it across the street.
In 1869, when Richard West, a local contractor, built his modest semi-detached brick home on John Street, he couldn’t have imagined that, 142 years later, there would be such things as 43-storey condo towers. What really would have confused him, though, is what happened on Saturday, when contractors working for Pinnacle International, a company developing just such a tower, moved the house—already uprooted from its foundation—across the street.
When the Pinnacle on Adelaide, as the new building is called, is completed in 2013, it will stand on the former site of West’s house, which, as a designated heritage property, is legally protected against demolition. Rather than wrangle with the city over destroying the house (years of business use have already left it pretty well gutted), Pinnacle chose another course: move it into the parking lot of its sales centre, directly across John Street, where it will be safe until it can be moved back, to a spot just slightly south of its original location. Once it’s resettled, the plan is to rent the space to a retailer.
The move got underway at 8 a.m. The house had been raised about six feet off the ground on sets of hydraulically stabilized wheels the size of aircraft landing gear. Workers from a company called Danco House Raising and Moving used electronic controls to pilot the whole thing into the middle of John Street, which was temporarily closed to traffic.
“I looked up John Street, and there was a building across the street,” said Luke Mullin, a middle-aged passerby. “That was kind of strange.” He was one of dozens of pedestrians who stopped to gawk and take cellphone photos.
“One of the tricky bits of this move is that we don’t have a flat surface to move on. We’ve got to come up this slope here,” said Christopher Borgal, heritage architect for the project, as he gestured toward a three-foot incline leading into the parking lot. Danco’s solution to this problem: build a makeshift ramp out of pieces of wood, then use a truck-mounted winch to drag the house into place. The truck, about the size of a small fire engine, skidded slightly, but succeeded, after four hours, in pulling the building up.
It was a gentler fate than West could have expected. In his day, a house like his would have simply been knocked down.
