[HN Gopher] In 1930, the 22M-pound Indiana Bell building was rot...
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In 1930, the 22M-pound Indiana Bell building was rotated 90 degrees
Author : rwmj
Score : 123 points
Date : 2023-04-19 11:52 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mastodon.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (mastodon.social)
| equalsione wrote:
| "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
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| I've never heard of this. Incredibly fun fact!
| finnh wrote:
| 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
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| paulette449 wrote:
| 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
| jtaillon wrote:
| 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...
| zacharyvoase wrote:
| 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!
| oriettaxx wrote:
| https://www.openculture.com/2021/04/when-the-indiana-bell-bu...
| n1b0m wrote:
| How did they get under the foundations of the building in order
| to move it?
| xenadu02 wrote:
| 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.
| tantalor wrote:
| You don't move the foundation, you move the building.
| n1b0m wrote:
| How do you get in between the foundations and the building to
| lift it?
| cuttysnark wrote:
| 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.
| n1b0m wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. This is on a much smaller
| scale but shows what you've described:
|
| https://youtu.be/Qnr5v0farM0
| kube-system wrote:
| 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/93cdbbe7117f16e89c74e490
| 9...
| hindsightbias wrote:
| 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...
| Joker_vD wrote:
| 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...
| nayuki wrote:
| 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.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > 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
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
| briffle wrote:
| 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 :)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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...
| burnished wrote:
| 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.
| nayuki wrote:
| Capital T is tesla, a unit of magnetic flux density.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| very important comment /s
| Ekaros wrote:
| Many of them even float... Referring to ships that are next
| size up.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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
| olyjohn wrote:
| Kinda blows my mind that it floats on water.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's basically thanks to the fact that the water under
| the ship is ~870 times more dense than the air inside the
| ship.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Probably had a bunch of domain knowledge left over from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
| Joker_vD wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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/
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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.
| dingosity wrote:
| And yet today we can't update a tag on a Lambda without something
| going wrong.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| 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...
| jonplackett wrote:
| > demolished in 63!
|
| After all that? FFS
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Put another way, by doing this, they managed to get another
| 33 years of useful life out of the building before its
| inevitable demolition.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| 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).
| jutrewag wrote:
| [flagged]
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And probably an entire floor or more of the building was
| dedicated to flooded lead/acid batteries for
| uninterrupted power to the telephone network.
| throwmeaway1212 wrote:
| Is this conjecture or fact?
| justin66 wrote:
| Why make stuff up?
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 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)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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/
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Indiana Bell Building was rotated 90deg 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 90deg_ -
| 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)
| mtoner23 wrote:
| 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-...
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| They did that one in only two days!
| openforce wrote:
| Things people do for Vaastu Compliance! /jk
| robotnikman wrote:
| Reminds me of the raising of Chicago, which happened in the
| 1850's
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
| returningfory2 wrote:
| 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...
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Distance per time seems like a very poor choice of unit for
| something that's roughly rotating about one corner of itself.
| f1shy wrote:
| It was not only rotated, but also shifted: ,,was shifted 52
| feet south"
| MrDunham wrote:
| 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.
| jmkb wrote:
| Picture an analog clock and it can be 0.008 hours/hour...
| about one percent of an hourhand's movement.
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| Someone wrote:
| 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" ;-)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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 ____"
| OJFord wrote:
| I would guess it's the length of the outermost arc, sort of
| makes sense with the relation to employees inside not noticing
| it.
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