7 ms·

A 1700-ton telco building that was relocated while running in 1950

212 points by mrmondo 9y ago

mrmondo 9y ago
Faninating story, I first heard of it while listening to the latter part of linked 99% Invisible podcast episode. There’s some information on Jorge Matute Remus the engineer who designed and ran the building move on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus
ciguy 9y ago
I actually saw this building and the statute of Jorge Matute Remus pushing it while visiting Guadalajara last year. Fascinating story.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Did you know about the story / history behind the building before visiting the area?
  - ciguy 9y ago
    No I had no idea, just kind of randomly came across it while walking around.
    - mrmondo 9y ago
      That somehow makes it even more special in my mind.
xg15 9y ago
Impressive feat - however, I was puzzled by this: > Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge. Maybe this could work as a publicity stunt to persuade the general public that there is no risk, but I can't imagine that you can reassure an expert who is familiar with the actual risks by rising the stakes. (Not to mention putting his wife and child in danger for a psychological exercise)
- hamburglar 9y ago
  He realized that the issue wasn't the stakes themselves, but rather the perception of the stakes.
- pwagland 9y ago
  You are correct in that… however I think that this harkens back to "talk is cheap, actions lead." That is, it is very easy to say "this is safe" even if you don't think that it is. By putting something that you value on the line, then you are showing your level of commitment to the statement that "this is safe". I think that you will find it is not the "technical experts" who were afraid, but the workers in the building. This is exactly the sort of action that reassures these people, since they see that you have "skin in the game". It is also worth noting that he almost certainly didn't believe that he was placing his wife and child in danger.
  - rimliu 9y ago
    There is also a tradition to have architect and engineer of the new bridge to float in the boat under it while the bridge is being load-tested.
- mseebach 9y ago
  The nervous people were the telephone workers inside the building, presumably not experts. By having having his own wife and child inside the building, the responsible engineer puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak. This is similar to the Chinese government ordering airline executives to be on a flight on new year's eve Y2K, so they won't cut corners to save money or whatever to make the fixes required.
- twic 9y ago
  See also the UK's minister of agriculture trying to feed his four-year-old daughter a beefburger during the mad cow disease era: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/16/newsid_2913000/2913807.stm1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/16/news...
  - 9y ago
cesarb 9y ago
I didn't see it mentioned there, so I have to ask: what about the cabling? Depending on where the telephone cables entered the building, they would have to get up to 12 meters longer. How did they make that work? Did they splice every cable? Or did the cables already have enough slack?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- downandout 9y ago
  This was my first thought, but I assume that they tackled this issue when they lifted the building, since keeping telephone service running during the process seems to have been the primary goal of the project. Perhaps once the building was up, they did whatever they needed to do to extend the cables.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  That depends very much on where the cables were running. Some of them will have gotten longer than needed, others shorter and for some it may not have made a big difference, merely a slight change of angle. The phone companies deal with cable splices all the time (roughly at the rate of backhoe deployment), so they most likely shut down the trunks one-by-one, extended the ones that needed more wire and they may or may not have decided to take up the slack in the remainder (to avoid parasitic inductance and capacitance from rolling up the excess wire).
- thaeli 9y ago
  Not sure about this specific example, but here's how cutovers between exchanges were achieved at the time. A similar process was probably used: https://youtu.be/VVTzEVPz1YA https://youtu.be/VVTzEVPz1YA (the actual cut-over procedure starts at 8:20)
rwmj 9y ago
I'm surprised that they don't move more buildings - I guess it is fabulously expensive. When I was a child I remember that one local building was moved to allow a road to be widened (http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=597 http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem...). I've never heard of a UK building being moved since.
- ljf 9y ago
  There used to be a show in the US about moving houses - generally they were wooden houses and moved a mile or so to either a new part of town or another town. I think the huge wide (and pretty empty looking) roads helped - I can't think of many cases where you'd be able to do similar in the UK due to the narrow roads. Plus I'd rather move a wooden house than a brick or even a stone one.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    It's fairly common to relocate houses in New Zealand, up to a couple of hundred km away. Wooden buildings built on piles used to be the standard construction method in New Zealand before poured concrete bases became the norm, so they're relatively easy to move: just chop the piles and jack it up onto a truck. My parent's friends actually gave a house away for free. They were rebuilding, it it was cheaper to give the house away for free and have the new owners pay to get it relocated, rather than pay for demolition.
    - suvelx 9y ago
      The Museum Hotel in Wellington was also moved in 1993. https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/74342852/museum-hotel-rides-the-rails--150-years-of-news https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/74342852/...
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    Legend has it my uncle bought his house for $1, cut it in half, paid the town to stop traffic for a day, and moved it a few blocks.
nathankunicki 9y ago
Zero-downtime deployments 1950s style.
- badosu 9y ago
  Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves of the many mission critical practical applications in disciplines outside of Computer Engineering.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
walshemj 9y ago
I am surprised that it was practical to move, I suppose it must have been a small manual branch exchange given the time. Big central offices are massive buildings often with deep basements.
- gaadd33 9y ago
  Is that true even in places with high water tables? Like much of Florida for example?
  - SMeltser 9y ago
    Im pretty sure even with a high water table, its not as though the water would seep through if its well sealed. A lot of times they have to seal them for fire-safety
linkmotif 9y ago
Reminds me of the raising of Chicago in the 1850-60s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
- ashleyn 9y ago
  I was floored to see shopkeeps still open while they moved the building. Today, OSHA would have a heart attack.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    Crazy huh? > Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc—on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.
mdda 9y ago
I saw the same thing being done with a theatre in Manhattan in 1998 (to make way for the Disneyfication of Times Square) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Theatre_(42nd_Street) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Theatre_(42nd_Street)
- mc32 9y ago
  The cleanup of NYTS was essential in getting tourists to keep going to new york as well as make it a livable place --companies were all moving to NJ for tax and quality of life reasons. I really do not miss all the sex shops and prostitutes, pushers and all around hustlers who used to have a run of the place. I for one am glad they cleaned that up.
- davidf18 9y ago
  AMC 25 movie theater is in the building now. Very interesting!
Ftuuky 9y ago
My father worked for a company in Switzerland in the 80s and early 90s that was solely specialized in relocating buildings: either too old to be demolished due to historical value or because it was a cheaper alternative than demolishing everything and building again 10 meters to the side. He loved that work but it was very stressful and took its toll on him. I was very young but still remember seeing this old wooden church crossing the street with my father running in circles yelling to people.
kasey_junk 9y ago
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/01/07/indiana-bell/4354705/ https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0... They moved and rotated an Indiana Bell building in the 1930s.
- nickpinkston 9y ago
  I came here to post this. It's crazy to see the big bundle of cable snaking away from the building!
jihadjihad 9y ago
Indianapolis has a very similar relocation story from 1930, with the 11,000-ton Indiana Bell building [1]. Fun fact: Kurt Vonnegut's father was the chief architect who recommended rotating the building [2]. Earlier than that, there was also a building that was moved by a team of horses to make way for the Indiana War Memorial, but I can't find a source anywhere (I read about it while touring the memorial). [1] http://www.paul-f.com/ibmove.html http://www.paul-f.com/ibmove.html [2] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/01/07/indiana-bell/4354705/ https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0...
geogriffin 9y ago
This gives new meaning to "location transparency" a la Erlang..

212 points by mrmondo 9y ago

Faninating story, I first heard of it while listening to the latter part of linked 99% Invisible podcast episode. There’s some information on Jorge Matute Remus the engineer who designed and ran the building move on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus

ciguy 9y ago

I actually saw this building and the statute of Jorge Matute Remus pushing it while visiting Guadalajara last year. Fascinating story.

mrmondo 9y ago
Did you know about the story / history behind the building before visiting the area?
- ciguy 9y ago
  No I had no idea, just kind of randomly came across it while walking around.
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    That somehow makes it even more special in my mind.

xg15 9y ago

Impressive feat - however, I was puzzled by this: > Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge. Maybe this could work as a publicity stunt to persuade the general public that there is no risk, but I can't imagine that you can reassure an expert who is familiar with the actual risks by rising the stakes. (Not to mention putting his wife and child in danger for a psychological exercise)

hamburglar 9y ago
He realized that the issue wasn't the stakes themselves, but rather the perception of the stakes.
pwagland 9y ago
You are correct in that… however I think that this harkens back to "talk is cheap, actions lead." That is, it is very easy to say "this is safe" even if you don't think that it is. By putting something that you value on the line, then you are showing your level of commitment to the statement that "this is safe". I think that you will find it is not the "technical experts" who were afraid, but the workers in the building. This is exactly the sort of action that reassures these people, since they see that you have "skin in the game". It is also worth noting that he almost certainly didn't believe that he was placing his wife and child in danger.
- rimliu 9y ago
  There is also a tradition to have architect and engineer of the new bridge to float in the boat under it while the bridge is being load-tested.
mseebach 9y ago
The nervous people were the telephone workers inside the building, presumably not experts. By having having his own wife and child inside the building, the responsible engineer puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak. This is similar to the Chinese government ordering airline executives to be on a flight on new year's eve Y2K, so they won't cut corners to save money or whatever to make the fixes required.
twic 9y ago
See also the UK's minister of agriculture trying to feed his four-year-old daughter a beefburger during the mad cow disease era: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/16/newsid_2913000/2913807.stm1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/16/news...
- 9y ago

cesarb 9y ago

I didn't see it mentioned there, so I have to ask: what about the cabling? Depending on where the telephone cables entered the building, they would have to get up to 12 meters longer. How did they make that work? Did they splice every cable? Or did the cables already have enough slack?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
downandout 9y ago
This was my first thought, but I assume that they tackled this issue when they lifted the building, since keeping telephone service running during the process seems to have been the primary goal of the project. Perhaps once the building was up, they did whatever they needed to do to extend the cables.
jacquesm 9y ago
That depends very much on where the cables were running. Some of them will have gotten longer than needed, others shorter and for some it may not have made a big difference, merely a slight change of angle. The phone companies deal with cable splices all the time (roughly at the rate of backhoe deployment), so they most likely shut down the trunks one-by-one, extended the ones that needed more wire and they may or may not have decided to take up the slack in the remainder (to avoid parasitic inductance and capacitance from rolling up the excess wire).
thaeli 9y ago
Not sure about this specific example, but here's how cutovers between exchanges were achieved at the time. A similar process was probably used: https://youtu.be/VVTzEVPz1YA https://youtu.be/VVTzEVPz1YA (the actual cut-over procedure starts at 8:20)

rwmj 9y ago

I'm surprised that they don't move more buildings - I guess it is fabulously expensive. When I was a child I remember that one local building was moved to allow a road to be widened (http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=597 http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem...). I've never heard of a UK building being moved since.

ljf 9y ago
There used to be a show in the US about moving houses - generally they were wooden houses and moved a mile or so to either a new part of town or another town. I think the huge wide (and pretty empty looking) roads helped - I can't think of many cases where you'd be able to do similar in the UK due to the narrow roads. Plus I'd rather move a wooden house than a brick or even a stone one.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  It's fairly common to relocate houses in New Zealand, up to a couple of hundred km away. Wooden buildings built on piles used to be the standard construction method in New Zealand before poured concrete bases became the norm, so they're relatively easy to move: just chop the piles and jack it up onto a truck. My parent's friends actually gave a house away for free. They were rebuilding, it it was cheaper to give the house away for free and have the new owners pay to get it relocated, rather than pay for demolition.
  - suvelx 9y ago
    The Museum Hotel in Wellington was also moved in 1993. https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/74342852/museum-hotel-rides-the-rails--150-years-of-news https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/74342852/...
- chatmasta 9y ago
  Legend has it my uncle bought his house for $1, cut it in half, paid the town to stop traffic for a day, and moved it a few blocks.

nathankunicki 9y ago

Zero-downtime deployments 1950s style.

badosu 9y ago
Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves of the many mission critical practical applications in disciplines outside of Computer Engineering.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

walshemj 9y ago

I am surprised that it was practical to move, I suppose it must have been a small manual branch exchange given the time. Big central offices are massive buildings often with deep basements.

gaadd33 9y ago
Is that true even in places with high water tables? Like much of Florida for example?
- SMeltser 9y ago
  Im pretty sure even with a high water table, its not as though the water would seep through if its well sealed. A lot of times they have to seal them for fire-safety

linkmotif 9y ago

Reminds me of the raising of Chicago in the 1850-60s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

ashleyn 9y ago
I was floored to see shopkeeps still open while they moved the building. Today, OSHA would have a heart attack.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  Crazy huh? > Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc—on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.

mdda 9y ago

I saw the same thing being done with a theatre in Manhattan in 1998 (to make way for the Disneyfication of Times Square) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Theatre_(42nd_Street) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Theatre_(42nd_Street)

mc32 9y ago
The cleanup of NYTS was essential in getting tourists to keep going to new york as well as make it a livable place --companies were all moving to NJ for tax and quality of life reasons. I really do not miss all the sex shops and prostitutes, pushers and all around hustlers who used to have a run of the place. I for one am glad they cleaned that up.
davidf18 9y ago
AMC 25 movie theater is in the building now. Very interesting!

Ftuuky 9y ago

My father worked for a company in Switzerland in the 80s and early 90s that was solely specialized in relocating buildings: either too old to be demolished due to historical value or because it was a cheaper alternative than demolishing everything and building again 10 meters to the side. He loved that work but it was very stressful and took its toll on him. I was very young but still remember seeing this old wooden church crossing the street with my father running in circles yelling to people.

kasey_junk 9y ago

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/01/07/indiana-bell/4354705/ https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0... They moved and rotated an Indiana Bell building in the 1930s.

nickpinkston 9y ago
I came here to post this. It's crazy to see the big bundle of cable snaking away from the building!

jihadjihad 9y ago

Indianapolis has a very similar relocation story from 1930, with the 11,000-ton Indiana Bell building [1]. Fun fact: Kurt Vonnegut's father was the chief architect who recommended rotating the building [2]. Earlier than that, there was also a building that was moved by a team of horses to make way for the Indiana War Memorial, but I can't find a source anywhere (I read about it while touring the memorial). [1] http://www.paul-f.com/ibmove.html http://www.paul-f.com/ibmove.html [2] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/01/07/indiana-bell/4354705/ https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0...

geogriffin 9y ago

This gives new meaning to "location transparency" a la Erlang..