No, they didn’t ever take the owner’s plans to move the old Brown Shoe factory across Jefferson Avenue seriously. It’s being demolished now.
A Blog detailing the beauty of St. Louis architecture and the buildup of residue-or character-that accumulates over the course of time.
No, they didn’t ever take the owner’s plans to move the old Brown Shoe factory across Jefferson Avenue seriously. It’s being demolished now.
Given that size of this building, would it have to be deconstructed and rebuilt to be moved? or is it possible to move something like this in a similar way that moved that one woman’s house from the NGA site?
I imagine that moving the building in one place would require treads the size used for the Space Shuttle before launch.
It would not have required larger dollies than any other building moving project, certainly not the anything remotely near the crawler-transporters used for the Space Shuttle (two-story tall tracked behemoths that travel on special path of Tennessee River gravel). What it would have required is many hydraulic dollies, probably more than any one company could provide. The Buster Brown Shoe Factory was estimated to be about 10,000 tons. That is a big building, about four times the weight of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and Minneapolis’s Shubert Theatre, but not impossible to move since larger and heavier ones have been moved in Europe. But I doubt any one company in the United States owns the required amount of hydraulic dollies, so a couple of companies would have needed to work together on the project. That was a small hurdle. The biggest hurdle and the one impossible to clear for this project is that moving the building required the active cooperation of the City of St. Louis. Murillo Flats was moved because the City of Des Moines was supportive of the relocation, same with the Shubert Theatre in Minneapolis, and same with the Gem/Century Theatre in Detroit (moved about five times as far as Jim Osher wanted to move the Buster Brown Factory). Not the same with St. Louis, which is why more of the city’s largest export, rubble, is being created.