Victorian House Hits the Road

An eight-ton Victorian house rolled past Memorial Hall and traveled along closed-off city streets in a four-hour spectacle Saturday, attracting hundreds of onlookers and clearing the way for Harvard’s biggest new construction project.

Suspended on sets of giant wheels resembling oversized aircraft landing gear, the historic three-story structure left its foundation at 96 Prescott St.—where it had stood for 116 years—around 9:30 a.m., and by mid-afternoon workers pulled the house into its new home on nearby Sumner Road.

The city dismantled all street and traffic lights along the route, and tree crews sawed off branches to make way. Police officers detoured traffic, and tow trucks stood at the ready.

Verizon erected temporary telephone poles and N-Star rerouted electric lines.

This was the second of two houses moved off land where Harvard is building its new Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS), and the mood on Saturday was celebratory.

In front of Gund Hall, Harvard’s community relations office supplied boxes of Dunkin Donuts and jugs of coffee to passersby. CGIS Project Manager Tom Murray looked on with his 4-year-old son Lian. And the project’s architect brought his parents for early Mother’s Day festivities.

Many of the firefighters and police officers on duty brought cameras to snap photos. Construction workers collected several hundred dollars in a pool betting on when the building would finally be in place.

And as the house made its way past an apartment building on Kirkland Street, a woman leaned out her fourth-floor window—not close enough to touch the slate mansard roof but able to wave at the scores of spectators gathered below.

T. Langdon Allen, who lives just down Sumner Road from the house’s final destination, watched the proceedings with his golden retriever Brodie.

Two years ago, when he and his wife moved into their 1845 Greek revival house on the corner, he says they didn’t realize they were in for years of construction.

A management consultant whose third-floor home office overlooks the CGIS construction sites, Allen says he isn’t getting much work done today.

“The moving is the fun part,” he says. “All the noise, dust and machinery is the bad part.”

“People in most parts of the country won’t ever get to see a house moved,” he adds. “Here in the space of a couple months we’ve seen two moved.”

He laughs—“it’s part of the joy of living in a construction zone.”

But Allen, who took an architecture class at the Harvard Extension School to learn more about the historic buildings in his neighborhood, says he thinks the project will bring long-run improvements.

“In a few years, it should be a beautiful-looking street again,” he says.

The dramatic moment of the move follows years of preparation, and it didn’t come cheap. Transporting the house itself cost about $80,000 and clearing the route added another $100,000, according to Murray.

About three weeks ago, workers began gutting the interior to lighten the load. They built wooden “cribbing” to support the structure, added metal I-beams and inserted hydraulic lifts. Then they sawed the house loose from its foundation and hoisted it onto the truck.

The process will be reversed once the house is precisely positioned in its new location. Workers will need several days to lower it onto the foundation, which has already been poured.

Work to close off the streets and take down utility lines began around 6 a.m. on Saturday. A little more than two hours later, nearing the designated hour for the house to start moving, Steve Stein chomps on a cigar.

The senior project manager for William A. Berry & Son, the project’s overall construction contractor, explains that a wedding is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. in the tiny Swedenborg Chapel that lies along the house’s route.

“We’re under the gun,” he says. “We’ve got to be done by 2:30.”

While Stein says he thinks they’ll make it, FAS Associate Dean for Physical Resources and Planning David A. Zewinski ’76 looks anxiously at a last traffic signal that crews are having trouble getting unbolted.

The house will leave its current lot and swing out onto Cambridge Street, then hang a right at the firehouse and travel along Quincy Street behind Memorial Hall before veering onto Kirkland Street, going past William James Hall and finally turning for home onto Sumner Road.

Zewinski—who oversees all FAS building projects—says the actual move itself, involving about 40 people altogether, will be straightforward compared to what came before and what is coming after. Harvard and its contractors began negotiating with city agencies and utilities over the relocation about two years ago. Intense logistical coordination of the moving day itself has taken about the last four months.

And after the relocation, a major restoration effort—at a cost roughly 10 times the total price tag of moving it—will begin. Zewinski says the finished product will look “gorgeous.”

Harvard plans renovations that will bring the 1887 building back to its original condition, including tearing off the aluminum siding and mosaic of turquoise tiles around the front door which onlookers described as tacky. Built as a rooming house for students and bought by Harvard in 1997, it will become a two-family complex for faculty members.

“It’s not an economical decision,” he says. “We’re doing historical preservation.”

Harvard cannot simply tear down the house, which cost its original owner $6,000 to build, because it is protected under Cambridge historical preservation laws. That is why Northeast Building Movers, the region’s leading firm for house relocations, will have to pick it up and maneuver it through the city’s streets.

The final turn onto Sumner Road will be the trickiest, in part because the contractor hired to remove trees from the route argued against cutting down one particular piece of greenery that got in the way.

The tree in question—a sweet gum—is a “good” tree, according to Jack Kelly, regional manager of Bartlett Tree Experts.

Kelly says he “fought hard” to keep it. So instead, his crews spent the morning tying back the branches of a silver maple on the opposite corner. The turn will have to be narrower but the sweet gum will survive.

Kelly, who started as a horticulturalist with Harvard’s grounds maintenance division two decades ago, started working on this project about two years ago, when several trees were cut down in preparation for this weekend’s move.

Kelly’s childhood home was two blocks away, and he says he believes the CGIS project will improve the area’s feel. As a boon to the neighborhood where it will construct CGIS’s two large academic buildings, the University plans to restore several wood-frame houses along Sumner Road that have fallen into disrepair.

Harvard will also install brick sidewalks and add 200 trees around the new academic buildings—trees that Kelly and his crews will plant.

“I have a lot of vested interest. I grew up here,” he says. “Life comes full circle.”

According to Charles M. Sullivan, director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, the restoration effort marks a “major shift” in Harvard’s attitude toward the old wood-frame houses that surround the Yard.

In contrast to some earlier eras, when Harvard looked at Victorian houses only as they fit into the University’s development plans, he says the current restoration project will help to “knit back the fabric of the neighborhood.”

By 10:25 a.m., the house has cleared the tough corner and only a couple branches of the sweet gum had to be cut off. Kirkland Street is immediately reopened to traffic, and back at the intersection of Cambridge and Quincy cranes are already lifting the stoplights back into place.

Getting this far took about an hour. The moving crew will spend the next three hours maneuvering the house into the lot on Sumner Road.

A crowd of about 30 people has been coming and going ever since the house started rolling around 9:30 a.m. On the corner of Cambridge and Quincy, Takafuni Katayama watches the house roll towards him and his wife Noriko, who pushes their daughter Kaya in a stroller.

Noriko Katayama walks this route every day, and as several large buildings were demolished recently to make way for CGIS, she began to wonder what was going to happen to the one house that was left.

Now, her husband says, they have their answer. And like most of the crowd, he’s incredulous.

“In my country, this never happens,” says the Massachusetts General Hospital employee, who came from Japan two years ago. “In my country, you destroy and then build up. This country hoists things. It’s unbelievable.”

They are only disappointed that they don’t have a camera with them.

Meanwhile, Tom Simister, a designer with the Casali Group, the firm managing the day-to-day construction details of CGIS, drifts around the site recording the sounds of the day with equipment borrowed from his girlfriend, who works for National Public Radio.

Simister interviews onlookers and construction workers. He even tried to question the gruff man who is busily in charge of directing the house into place over the foundation.

“Talking to him is a little like pulling teeth,” he says, smiling, “but it’s such a great group of personalities.”

Casali has its own official photographer for the project, who walks around with two cameras slung over his shoulder. And there’s another man in charge of videotaping. Eventually, Simister says, his audio recording will be combined with the video in a documentary.

Even if it’s not part of his work for CGIS, Simister says he still wants to make the documentary on his own just for fun.

Marjorie A. Lombardi also has her camera out to document the move, but her photographs are strictly business. The project manager for Northeast Building Movers snaps pictures of every job for promotional purposes.

She watches as a spool on the company’s 1957 tractor cab winds up metal cables pulling the house into place. Since the lot is too small for a truck to drive the house in, crew members work under the house to point the wheels in the right direction.

At 1:44 p.m., Lombardi pronounces: “And it is in place.”

About ten minutes later, Eddy N. Couturier climbs down from a truck he was manuevering out of the way. He spent most of the day on the street overseeing his six-man crew in a white hardhat.

“I direct from out front,” he explains. “You can’t see nothing from in here.”

Over the last 25 years, Couturier reckons, he has moved between 1,000 and 1,500 structures.

He first saw the spectacle of a house on wheels as a young construction worker, when he once worked on a project where a building mover was brought in. In 1983 he founded Northeast Building Movers, which now averages more than 50 jobs per year.

Saturday’s move was hardly his company’s largest project. Two years ago, Northeast crews relocated a brick firehouse in Kendall Square that was three times the size and weighed about 400 tons.

But the Prescott Street house was above average in size, and the turn onto Sumner Road was a “tight” one. As far as he’s concerned, the day went well.

“I wouldn’t say routine,” he chuckles, “but this is what we do routinely.”

—Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.