The old gray coach house ain’t what it used to be. It’s not even where it used to be. Built as a small farmhouse in the 1890s, it was dragged back to the alley to make room for a larger rental property in the 1930s, set in the soil on an uneven concrete foundation, and left pretty much untouched until this year. Crumbling, rat infested, tilted and on the verge of tumbling down, it was about to go on the move again. Only this time it was going straight up.
Raising his voice over the racket the captain explained that before the new foundation could be poured the house would have to be raised into the air, and the crew inside was preparing it for the trip. “We’re going to jack the place up this afternoon. Right after lunch,” he promised. “We’ve been shoring up the structure for over a week now. Once the place goes up, every board in it is going to straighten out. It’s leaned over crooked for such a long time, the whole thing could come straight down.” If it did collapse it would be on his head–as well as those of the four other workers. “What goes up must come down,” he said. “But not today. I hope.”
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“When you lift a ship you wet the sand to slick the way, haul the bastard up on the beach, and jack it up from there. The jacks are much bigger than these I’m using here.” Twelve of them sat squat in the sand: four held posts up against the central beam, and the rest were jammed under three walls–the lowest side and the two adjoining it. Colored bright orange, each jack was about a foot tall; they looked like little torpedoes. “We won’t finish today,” said Thomsen. “If we go up four inches we’ll be doing good. When we’re done we’ll set the jacks and pound in five dead men.” “Dead men” are wooden planks; Thomsen had stacks of them lined up in the remains of a yard waiting to fill the gap. “I don’t know why they’re called that,” he said, “they just are.”
Each man took his place, hands wrapped around a jack handle. One crouched in each of the two sunken corners, just barely visible in the dark, while one leaned on the far wall and the last hugged a board that had been placed on a jack like a pillar in the center of the house. Finn needed quiet to hear the building’s responses to the jacks. The sounds it made would determine the order in which they’d be pumped. “Ready for lift-off,” the crewman by the pillar said. Finn nodded. No one counted backwards.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Mike Tappin.
