Cambridge rocket ship sold, set to touch down at new home
CAMBRIDGE — Sometime in the next week, there will be liftoff.
The mock silver rocket ship, reaching 30 feet into the sky at the Hespeler Road entrance of the doomed Satellite Motel, is set to leave the perpetual launch pad the steel landmark has been perched on since 1962.
Its earthly destination? About three kilometres and a few transport-truck turns onto Samuelson Street.
It’ll pop up in front of an auto shop run by Jim McLaughlin, the rocket ship’s new owner. His welder-fabricator father Jimmy helped Irving Steel of Galt build the pretend planet-hopper some 56 years ago.
“Every time we drove past it, he said he built that one,” McLaughlin said of his late father on Wednesday as footings were poured for a concrete base to hold the rocket outside Ace Tire & Auto.
“There used to be a kids’ one that you played on in Churchill Park. He built that, too, but the city tore that one down and just scrapped it without talking to anybody. When I found out this one was coming up, I thought I’d try and make a concerted effort to see if I could get my hands on it.”
McLaughlin soon will have his hands on that space ship on an I-beam pedestal, constructed in part by his Scottish immigrant father on the orders of local motel visionary Horace Bardwell.
Between purchasing the rocket from Housing Cambridge and paying the costs of moving it a few kilometres south to the property he owns, McLaughlin said he will spend thousands of dollars.
A crane will lift the rocket onto a truck, perhaps as early as Saturday. But rain could push that operation into next week.
“I’m not using it for advertising. I’m strictly going to preserve it. Like, we’re not putting our company name or anything on it,” McLaughlin said of the rocket.
“I’d hate to see it go down to Hamilton to get melted down. Or end up on Hespeler Road somewhere else where somebody is leasing a building for three years and then they move out and then the thing’s in limbo.”
A foundation to hold the funky retrorocket might wait to be poured until after this week’s cold snap. By Nov. 30, the rocket must leave the old motel site. The countdown is on.
“I’ve got lots of problems right now,” McLaughlin said Wednesday after digging at the auto shop
accidentally cut his communication lines.
McLaughlin made the only offer to Housing Cambridge, which had put out a request for proposals to purchase and preserve the rocket ship. The nonprofit came into possession of the rocket after buying the motel site with a private partner last year.
Housing Cambridge will use the cash from selling the rocket — McLaughlin is not divulging how much he paid — for expenses in setting up affordable units in
one of two apartment buildings to rise where the motel will stand for only a few more weeks.
But while the motel will be no more, the rocket, a McLaughlin handiwork in part, will endure on clan-owned land.
“We did want to preserve the rocket,” Housing Cambridge general manager Steve Garrison said.
“It is a landmark and we wanted to get it a good home. We didn’t really want the expense of having to remove it. I think everybody wins.”