Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

 BODILY. GO and 70 feet until it fronted on Moving a 9,500-ton Theatre. AND NEW MONTAUK For with little city HUDSON AVENUE SKETCH OF OLD SITE OF THEATRE. HOW BUILDINGS ARE TRANSPORTED OUSE-MOVING—in the most literal sense — is a recognized profession in the United States, where the engineer is often called upon to transfer heavy brick and stone edifices bodily from one place to another. One of the most daring and remarkable of these feats recently carried out was the removal of the old Montauk Theatre in Brooklyn. The edifice is a brick structure, having a total length of 153 feet, a width at its widest part of 45 feet, and a weight of some 9,500 tons, so that its transference demanded no little engineering skill, some fifty years the theatre had stood its fagade on De Kalb Avenue. Some time ago the authorities decided to construct an ex- tension of Flatbush Avenue ; and as the new street line cut diagonally through the centre of the building, the theatre was purchased by the city authorities, who subsequently sold it to private purchasers. It was course, that these would pull imagined, of the edifice down, but they decided otherwise. They consulted the house-movers, and Messrs. Iversen and Gustaven signed a contract agreeing to transfer the edifice from its old site to another on Hudson Avenue. What the feat meant will be gathered by our sketch, showing the old and the new position of the building. Briefly, the task consisted in moving the theatre bodily 47 feet back from De Kalb Avenue, slewing it round through an angle of 87 degrees, and then moving it forward between Hudson Avenue. The first step the con- tractors took in moving this vast shell of a building, which has no interior division walls, was to bind the outer walls to- gether, and to provide a system of struts and tie-rods to keep the whole structure in true vertical position. The proscenium arch, which has a 35-foot opening spanned by a steel girder, next re- ceived attention. The load of the wall above this arch is carried upon two brick piers. In order to relieve the arch of some of its load, vertical timber posts were placed across the opening. The edifice now being prepared, operations were begun for its removal. A series of holes were first cut through the base of the theatre PreParations „ o . for Removal. walls, 3 feet apart, centre to centre, and through, each hole were intro- duced two 15-inch I-beams. At their ends these I-beams rested upon two parallel lines of crib work, one on each side of the wall. The crib work was built up as follows : Upon the ground were first laid 12-inch by 12-inch timbers in courses of varying depth to com- pensate for the irregularity of the ground, and upon these were laid parallel lines of steel rails in groups of four, there being one such group directly below each point at which the wall of the building was pierced for the sup- porting I-beams. Immediately below the I- beams which supported the walls longitudinal lines of 15-inch I-beams were laid in pairs parallel to the walls, and between the bottom of these last-named beams and the top of the steel rails were introduced th© 2-inch steel