Little house on the move to make space for condo
After almost 130 years — and 30 hours of site preparation — it took less than 20 minutes to move historic Leslie House to its temporary home across the lane from 1380-82 Hornby St. in downtown Vancouver.
The house first needed to be lifted off its foundation for supporting steel beams to be put in place, then slid sideways onto another steel transport structure for the move. Two sets of wheels were placed beneath the frame at the rear of the house, then a diesel truck backed into place with a cross beam to support the front.
A driver with Supreme Structural Transport Ltd., under the close watch of an experienced foreman and members of his crew, skilfully backed the whole house 60 metres across the lane, making it look as easy as backing a holiday trailer into a camping spot.
“There’s a fair amount of planning and preparation work and a relatively quick execution, I guess,” said Bill Christensen, president of Supreme Structural Transport.
That included engineering work to design structural supports inside the house so that its balloon frame would survive the move, Christensen said.
“It’s a spectacular project to work on, a spectacular old house,” he added about the project to move what is if not the oldest, one of the oldest houses built in the city.
Supreme completed the move on behalf of Ledcor Construction, lead contractor for the developer Grosvenor Americas.
One onlooker on Tuesday had a particular interest in the move, having owned the house and made it famous in the city.
“I’m happy that everybody worked hard to save it,” said Vancouver restaurateur Umberto Menghi, who ran restaurants on the site, including his famous Il Giardino.
“I thought it was the best location,” Menghi said.
It was a leisurely stroll from downtown at lunch, with ample parking (then) for people to arrive at dinner since there was little more than a few houses across the street.
“It did me good (and gave) me a life,” Menghi said. “It opened up the world for me in my business the first time.”
And Menghi’s ownership of the site is a crucial part of the history that architect Robert Lemon said will be important to preserve.
“People knew it as Umberto’s little yellow house and it’s been like that since the mid-’70s,” said Lemon, who has been involved with the Leslie House restoration since 2005 under an unrealized vision Menghi had for the site.
The house was moved to make way for a 39-storey condo tower by Grosvenor Americas called The Pacific.
It will be moved back to face Pacific Boulevard, with setbacks around all sides to give it “some breathing room,” Lemon said.
While it is not the house’s original site, Lemon said from an urban-planning perspective, it was the best option to preserve and present it.
“It’s never perfect to have a little wooden house surrounded by towers, but it’s so important to the city,” Lemon said, as one of the first houses to be built in the city following the fire of 1886 and the last remaining house from old Yaletown.
It was built in 1888 as a family home for Cape Breton plasterer George Washington Leslie, and Lemon said there is still a fair amount of original plaster work on its first floor — likely done by Leslie — that will be restored.
“There is quite a bit of original material that will be retained as part of its interior use,” Lemon said, including an original staircase and stained-glass windows. Wiring and other infrastructure will be modernized.
Lemon is working on a historical interpretation for the final restoration that will help tell its story from its beginning, through its conversion to commercial use in 1947 — first as an interior design studio, and then a fashion house — before Menghi took it over.
“It was one of the earliest buildings that’s gone from being a residence to commercial use,” Lemon said. “It’s had this interesting history of layering of uses within this container of a historic wooden house.”