fifteen inches an hour

The building weighs eleven thousand tons and it is going to move, and the first thing you do is teach everything rigid that connects it to the world how to bend. The water main, the gas, the sewer, the steam, the electric — and the telephone cables, thousands of them, because the building is a telephone exchange and a telephone exchange is the one kind of building that cannot stop being itself for even an afternoon. Each line gets lengthened. Each rigid run gets a loop of slack coiled into it, an allowance, a held breath, so that when the building walks away from its old footings the pipe pays out instead of tearing. You are not severing the building from the city. You are giving it leash.

Underneath, you cut the structure free of its foundation and set it on a cradle of steel and timber and rollers, and you jack the whole mass up off the ground onto the cradle, and then you push. Not mainly with engines — with hand jacks, men on hydraulic rams turning the screws by hand, a steam engine helping where the arithmetic needs it. Six strokes of a jack moves the building three-eighths of an inch. Six more, another three-eighths. A foreman calls the strokes. Eleven thousand tons go forward in eighths of an inch, fifteen inches in an hour — slower than a shadow crosses a floor, slower than anything a body is built to notice.

And that is the point of the fifteen inches. It is the speed of not-noticing. Six hundred people work inside the building while it moves. They come in through a door that is no longer where it was the week before — a wooden sidewalk on rollers follows the building out, relaid as it goes, so the entrance is always somewhere a person can reach it — and they hang their coats and sit down and take calls. A woman at the switchboard pushes a cord into a jack and connects a man in one part of the city to his mother in another, and the floor under her chair is traveling south at fifteen inches an hour, and she does not feel it, because there is nothing to feel. Motion below the threshold isn’t motion to the body. It is only the world being where it is.

The building does not just slide. It turns. They need it facing a new direction, a quarter of the way around from true, so the move is a slide and a pivot and another slide — fifty-two feet south, ninety degrees of rotation, a hundred feet west — and a quarter turn is a strange thing to ask of eight stories without cracking a window or a water glass. The far corner, the one swinging through the widest arc, has to travel much farther than the near corner, and it has to travel it at exactly the rate that keeps the whole rigid mass square to itself, every beam holding its angle, the elevators running plumb in their shafts the entire month. The men with the jacks on the long side stroke faster than the men on the short side. The building comes around like a slow hand on a dial no one can see. The people inside keep their appointments.

Nothing happens. That is the achievement, and it is almost impossible to photograph. Not one call dropped in a month of moving. Not one day of work lost — the company books the same hours it would have booked standing still. No glass spilled. The whole genius of the thing lives in its uneventfulness, in the thousands of small allowances that add up to a building quietly going about its business in a different place each evening than it woke in. You measure the success by the absence of incident. The story is that there is no story, held steady at eleven thousand tons for thirty days.

And the cables hold the whole time. The coiled loops pay out, inch by inch, the lines stretching into their allowances as the building leaves its old position behind — never pulling taut, never once severing the woman at the switchboard from the man calling his mother. The building moves and the calls go through it the entire way. By the time it stops, settled onto its new foundation facing its new direction, the slack is gone — spent, paid out, every line now running straight to where the building actually is. They had been long enough for all of it. Someone had measured, before the first stroke of the first jack, exactly how far the building was going to go.