I’m leaving my apartment bright and early one morning, on my way to meet Ashley across town for breakfast. As usual, I’m running late, because I’m a total bastard. So I hop on my bike, still rubbing sleep from my eyes, and tear ass down my street. I don’t get more than a block before I notice something…unusual. Something that wasn’t along this route yesterday. Something that certainly did not belong in the road.
That can’t be right, I think. I rub my eyes as if the mere presence of lingering eye-boogies can somehow be responsible for such an optical distortion that they can cause a house to appear in the road. When this fails to have any effect, I consider the possibility that I might somehow still be asleep, so I close my eyes and pop myself in the jaw once, hard. (Note: for those of you wanting to try this at home, closing your eyes and punching yourself whilst traveling down a hill at speed on a bike in traffic is not that great of an idea.) When I open my eyes again, I see:
The house is still there, and there’s also a thousand people milling around to marvel at this house that somehow crawled its way off its foundation and on to the street, and all of them are completely oblivious to the fact that I am late for my breakfast date. Gritting my teeth, I dig in to my pedals and build up to full ramming speed, figuring that I will just plow through crowd and creeping house both.
The house won, of course. I detoured.
I found out later that they had projected about three hours to move the house the three blocks to its semi-permanent home in a parking lot down the street. It ended up taking until something like 10 o’clock that night, as apparently nobody in the city had thought to use a tape measure before hand and so it caught everyone off guard when it ended up being wider than the street. According to the project’s website, they’re going to move the house back to its original spot in October of next year. I’ll be sure to leave for breakfast a bit earlier on that day.
August 7th, 2007 on 9:28 am
I would have thought that the man in the bright red pants would have been enough to make one slow down, but barring that, a house in the street sure would do it. But that building looks pretty decrepit. I totally think you could have rammed your way through it…
August 7th, 2007 on 11:22 am
So do you know what was so special about this house that they had to move it only to move it again in year?
Seems like a lot of trouble for a house.
August 7th, 2007 on 7:27 pm
I think I would have done everyone a favor if I had rammed through that house. I’m all in favor of saving old buildings, but that house in particular has been so decrepit for so long that I was kind of surprised that they were moving in instead of just tearing it down. I suppose the “Friends of the Ladd House” will have taken up enough of a collection by the time they want to put it back that they’ll be able to renovate it.
They moved it rather than let it get destroyed because of a developer’s burning urge to build another glass tower chock full of condos on that block and the house would have been in the way for the construction phase. I don’t know about other cities but here in Portland our number one problem isn’t the crowds of urban homeless or shitty roads, it’s the CRIPPLING SHORTAGE OF CONDOMINIUMS. Every square inch of free space is being used for construction to aid what I can only assume must be tens of thousands of idle rich who are suffering for lack of overpriced condos. If I had a crane and a bit of seed capital I think I would stack ten manufactured homes on top of each other in the parking lot across the street, throw up some scaffolding for stairs, and sell them off as half-million dollar condos complete with “Distinct Urban Living Experience”.
August 8th, 2007 on 11:54 am
“it ended up being wider than the street…”
Wow, I’d at least have tried to lie and say I measured in metric or something. I mean if it works for NASA…
August 8th, 2007 on 7:20 pm
this is what happens when yard sales go bad.