A 400-ton apartment building will continue its trip Downtown

By Francesca Pica

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    MADISON, Wisconsin (madison.com/Wisconsin State Journal) — Inch by excruciating inch, crews carefully began moving a 400-ton, four-story brick apartment building in Downtown Madison Thursday, intending to carry it to its new home about a block and a half away.

They made it about 200 feet.

Still, although it took about 12 hours, the crews cleared one of the trickiest parts of the move, which was unwedging the 84-foot-long building from the tight spot where it stood at 438 W. Dayton St. and turning it 90 degrees, where it would remain in the middle of the street overnight.

Workers plan to resume moving the building to a now-empty lot at 531 W. Mifflin St. on Friday, owner Brandon Cook said.

Built in 2002, the building is the heaviest ever moved in Madison, Cook said.

Using a remote controller to operate a series of trailers supported by 112 wheels, Matt Childs, a foreman with Heritage Movers, began easing the building out onto the street shortly before 7 a.m., where it immediately had to make a sharp right turn, narrowly missing a neighboring house.

Movers had less luck with a mature tree across the street. Unable to clear the obstacle, crews with the city’s Urban Forestry division first began cutting branches that hung over the street before ultimately cutting the tree down, causing an hours-long delay.

“We’re trying to keep going and move as quickly as we can,” Cook said early Thursday.

As the building nosed into the street, Downtown residents Georgie and Jerry Suttin had to stop and watch. They ended up taking videos to send to their grandchildren.

“We’re just amazed to see a building of this size move,” Georgie Suttin said.

At one point, residents across the street started playing the 1982 hit “Our House” by Madness from their front porch as the building sat, fittingly, in the middle of the street.

‘Such an inconvenience’

While the move made for an unusual diversion on an otherwise gloomy morning, it also presented some disruptions for area residents.

To make way for the colossal cargo, crews with Spectrum and Madison Gas and Electric took down telephone wires, internet cables and light posts, and a few residents found their driveways blocked by what used to be the home of their neighbors across the street.

Dayton Street resident Jordan Appel said she was stuck in her home without internet or air conditioning until the power lines could be reconnected. She worried the food in her refrigerator might spoil.

Although her landlord told her and her roommate that the move would be happening, she said she didn’t know “that this was going to be such an inconvenience.”

Her roommate had to walk to work Thursday morning because her car was trapped in the driveway. And the tree that was cut down stood in front of their house.

Once the building was fully moved onto Dayton Street at about 4:30 p.m., crews with Madison Gas and Electric began restoring power to residents in the area.

As difficult as moving the building was, getting the different crews to work in sync was another challenge, said David DeVooght, co-owner of DeVooght House Lifters, one of the moving companies involved in the project.

“I think they jumped the gun a little bit and pulled the power off right away at 5 o’clock in the morning before we even got to close the road,” DeVooght said of the utility companies, while the forestry workers showed up later than the movers had hoped.

“The tree people, they showed up at about 8, you know, and everybody else is here at 5,” he said. “You know, we did sit around to make decisions on the tree that should have been removed prior to us moving the building.”

Once the tree was removed, he said, the rest of the work Thursday went relatively quickly.

Site to house 12-story building

DeVooght was optimistic the rest of the move would go smoother on Friday.

“I think as long as everybody is on the same page again, and we got the power cut when we’re ready to go, everything should be all right and we’re all set,” he said.

A second, much lighter wood-frame house at 432 W. Dayton St., a carriage house behind 430 W. Dayton St., also will be moved, but is “significantly easier,” Cook said.

The buildings are among 10 residential buildings that are being moved or razed on the block to make way for a 12-story, 232-unit apartment building by Core Spaces, of Chicago, which has put up other student housing projects in the city, including HUB and The James.

The Madison City Council approved the project, to be named “Johnson and Bassett,” last summer after initially rejecting it over the lack of low-cost units and complaints about the proliferation of luxury apartment buildings in the area.

Cook owns the apartment building and the single-family home also being relocated, as well as the lot on Mifflin Street they’re being moved to. He said he wanted to keep the buildings up instead of demolishing them and “throwing them away in a landfill” like the other houses that will be torn down for the new development.

With 19 bedrooms over four units, the apartment building and the carriage house will also preserve some much-needed Downtown housing stock, he said.

“They’re high-quality newer buildings,” he said. “The building I had on Mifflin Street was 100 years old and really small.”

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