Moving WildCare’s Historical Building
As you know, WildCare has begun work on our new facility at 76 Albert Park Lane in San Rafael, California.
This project, decades in the making, will elevate the organization with a gorgeous new 3-story Wildlife Hospital, improved visitor courtyard and education spaces, and many more amenities to support WildCare's invaluable work. Learn more about the project here!
As part of that project, we are renovating the historical building, built in 1879, that has been on the site, and at the heart of our programs, since the 1950s.
But to begin construction, the historical building needed to be MOVED!
Read the article about the move in the Marin Independent Journal!
How do you move a building built in 1879? The answer, of course, is "very carefully", but "much the same way the Egyptians built the pyramids" is also true!
This photo shows the carefully-constructed cribbing, leveled to be perfectly flat, over which are placed massive 6x6 wooden beams. Heavy metal pipes serve as rollers.
The building is entirely braced from beneath with steel beams, with wooden "feet" attached as the contact points for the rollers.
A gentle tug by a tractor attached to the building by a heavy chain, and the entire structure moves forward! Workers underneath the building carefully remove and replace the rolling pipes as forward progress is made.
You can actually watch this happening in the video at the top of the page!
The cribbing and wooden beams that make up the tracks the building is rolling across must be dismantled after the building has passed over them, and then reconstructed for the next stage.
In all, the building moved 113 feet horizontally across the site, and then adjustments had to be made to move it another 24 feet forward. The whole process is incredibly complicated and work-intensive, but everything went exactly as planned, thanks to the experience and expertise of the teams at Cahill Construction and Wacker & Sons (3rd Generation).
The building will rest in its temporary location while the deep foundation work and concrete slabs are poured, and then it will be moved again to its permanent location at the front of the site, where it will undergo a full renovation.
The building was built in 1879 as the parish hall for the St. Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael. The Historic Design Review done for WildCare notes that "The parish hall is a rare local example of Carpenter Gothic architecture, featuring steeply pitched gables, decorative bargeboard, lancet windows, and original wood interiors."
The building is eligible for the California Register of Historical Resources.
Amazingly, this move will actually be the third time the building has been moved... it changed positions once on the church property, and then was put on a truck and moved to Albert Park Lane in 1953 to become the Junior Museum of Marin that then became the Marin Wildlife Center.
Photo used with permission from the Anne T. Kent California Room, Marin County Free Library
