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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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)
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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
> 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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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 ____"
"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...