They moved a building with 600 people working inside

Indianapolis, autumn of 1930. The Indiana Bell Telephone building, eight storeys of brick and steel at 240 North Meridian Street, was in the way: the phone company wanted to put up its new headquarters on that same plot. The obvious thing was to knock it down, and there were six hundred people at work inside. They did not knock it down. They turned it ninety degrees and walked it half a block with everybody still inside, and not one of the six hundred lost a day's work.

Beneath those six hundred people there was also the switching centre that carried telephone service for half the city, and it could not be shut off for a single afternoon.

The job was run by a local architecture firm, Vonnegut, Bohn & Mueller — the Vonnegut on the letterhead was Kurt Vonnegut senior, the novelist's father — and underneath it was crude heavy labour: cut the building free of its foundations, leave it resting on a platform of timber beams and steel rollers, and push it with hydraulic jacks. Sixteen metres to the south, ninety degrees of rotation and another thirty metres to the west. Around eleven thousand tons advancing at thirty-eight centimetres an hour, which is the length of a forearm every sixty minutes, and only during the hours when the jacks were actually pushing. The whole job took thirty-four days.

Water, gas, drainage, electricity and telephone cable all entered the building through the floor, and a rigid pipe with a building moving on top of it breaks. They swapped the rigid runs for slack, flexible connections and kept lengthening them as the building pulled away from its own pavement. The lift, the toilets and the heating did not stop once in five weeks, in an Indiana autumn.

And then there was the most domestic detail of all: the front door. Every morning the main entrance stood more than a metre further from where it had been the evening before, so a crew moved the entrance steps too, day by day, so that the six hundred employees could climb stairs that actually led somewhere. The switchboard operators clocked in every morning of that month.

Inside, nothing showed. The building advanced so slowly that no vibration reached it, no noise, no objects sliding across desks. People registered the progress through the window, by comparing the view with the day before, or by the new flight of steps waiting for them in the morning.

In November the building stopped. The face that had looked onto North Meridian Street now looked onto the side street, half a block away; the cleared plot was ready for the new headquarters and the structure had not a single repair to make.

In 1963, thirty-three years after that month of hydraulic jacks and portable staircases, Indiana Bell demolished the building it had gone to such trouble not to demolish.