We've talked a lot about moving the past few weeks — but few of us will ever have the experience of physically moving an entire house. On Saturday, Alexander Hamilton’s country home, the Grange was moved from its home on Convent Avenue and 141st Street (first moved in 1889, the house had only been at its most recent location for 119 years of its 206 year existence) to around the corner and down the block into it's new foundation in St. Nicholas Park...
Financed by the National Park Service, the move took years of planning. The
graphic from The New York Times does an excellent job of explaining the difficulties of the phyiscal move, while the slideshow lets us view the progress of the move.
The house, with it's new foundation in the foreground:
Check out all the coverage from The New York Times — there are two brief articles, Hamilton Home Heads to a Greener Address and Witnessing a House, and History, on the Move. Additionally, the interactive graphic,
Moving a Historic Home and slideshow of the move, Moving Day for the Grange are full of information. Did any ATers witness the move?
(Pics: Andrew Henderson)
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
When I was in high school someone moved a GIANT victorian home from one corner down the street from school to a big open lot directly across from it. They didn't move it on the road - they went across a big field - and they took it apart and moved it in pieces. It was the coolest semester ever, watching that house make its dismantling/move/rebuilding and renovation from the view of our art room windows. (And for a school that only had two total windows in the whole building - one in the art room, one in the biology lab), it was a pretty cool site. I would've loved to see the Hamilton house moved on city streets, though. It was cool enough out in the country.
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I had an old house moved. It really appeals to my saving and hording nature to keep a whole house out of the landfill. The movers cut off the top so it could fit under traffic lights and it traveled about 15 miles. I wanted to ride in it but couldn't because of liability so I rode with the mover's wife behind it. They move them early Sunday morning and have a big crew to run beside it, ride in it and lift stoplights over it and drive traffic guard vehicles before and behind it. It was thrilling because I wanted it for a long time.
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