La Ronda could be moved, but slowly

Yes, it can be done.

It is possible to move a house as big and sprawling as La Ronda, the historic mansion in Bryn Mawr slated for imminent demolition.

The technology and the knowhow exist, professional house movers said yesterday. And in this instance at least, incredible as it may seem, size doesn't matter.

"It would be possible to move a house of that magnitude," said Mark Buckingham of Wolfe House & Building Movers, which is based in Bernville, Berks County, and which moves from 130 to 180 houses a year. "The size and weight of the building just determine how much equipment you need. As long as you have the equipment, you could do it."

Almost at the eleventh hour, Benjamin Wohl, a Florida real estate developer, has given hope to the quest to save La Ronda by offering to buy the residence, designed by the noted architect Addison Mizner and built in 1929, and move it to an adjoining parcel that he has an option to purchase in the Lower Merion neighborhood.

Given the size of La Ronda - it's 200 feet long, and its first floor occupies a footprint of 8,590 square feet - the plan might seem quixotic. But Wohl has experience in such endeavors.

An admirer of Mizner's architecture, he and his family live in a 10,000-square-foot Mizner-designed house in Palm Beach that he had moved and, like La Ronda, saved from the wrecking ball.

During the last couple of weeks, Wohl has contacted several house-moving companies, and they've all told him the same thing: It can be done.

The most important thing about moving a house, said Gabe Matyiko of Expert House Moving, a third-generation firm with offices in several parts of the country, "is, you need some guy with money."

On that count, Wohl would seem to qualify. Moving a small frame house can cost $10,000. A big job - Matyiko's company moved the historic Newark, N.J., airport terminal, a three-story concrete building that was 99 yards long - can cost millions.

The next big concern is the width of the roads. Again, in this case, not a problem, because La Ronda could travel across a lawn and driveway the distance of a football field to an adjacent lot on which its original carriage house still stands.

The first step in moving a house is calculating its weight and important stress points - places where there are load-bearing walls, for instance.

"When you move a masonry building, you have to make sure the chassis is rigid, that it doesn't bend at all," Matyiko said. Otherwise, cracks and fissures might result.

After these calculations, movers excavate around the foundation, poke holes into it, and insert steel beams, spaced about every five feet. This framework of crisscrossing beams forms the chassis, or bed, that supports the house during the move.

With a system of interconnected hydraulic jacks, the house is raised in increments ranging from six to 12 inches until it stands several feet above the foundation walls. This so-called unified jacking machine enables the structure to be elevated so that it's level, each jack adjusting to the varying load above it.

After the house is jacked up, the movers fill in and level the basement, and bring in a fleet of self-propelled hydraulic dollies. With a huge house, as many as 50 dollies might be required. Each dolly supports the house with a hydraulic piston that automatically moves to adapt to the terrain and keep the structure even. The dollies are linked and periodically reoriented to ensure they're traveling in the same direction.

Now, the slow roll to the new site begins. Once there, the house is lowered carefully on a new foundation.

Jim Garrison, a consultant hired to perform an architectural survey of La Ronda as a condition for obtaining a township demolition permit, said the house was sturdily built and in excellent shape. Moving it, he said, is "very much a doable proposition."

Nevertheless, there are challenges, he said.

The adjacent parcels are downhill, and movers would have to steer the structure around a formal garden and several mature trees if they wished to preserve them. The basement runs under less than half of the mansion's first floor. The monumental part of the house - the great hall and family spaces - is erected on concrete slabs on the ground. Furthermore, the exterior walls are fabricated of hollow clay tile and wood framing covered with stucco - "relatively brittle construction."

Because the building consists of several sections joined in almost a modular fashion, with a great hall, a service wing, and a couple of family wings, "you'd probably want to cut it into several pieces," Garrison said.

Mizner's typical method was to create a hollow box or shell, and fill it with interior fittings manufactured in Florida and assembled on site. La Ronda is, to a large degree, "a kit of parts," Garrison said. One way to proceed is to deconstruct those parts, build the shell at another location, and refit it with distinctive interior features harvested from the original structure.

Mike Hart was hoping to do that. Hart, of Harleysville, runs Hartland Restoration and the nonprofit Foundation for Historic Building Rescue. He said he was the only person invited by the builder of the house proposed for the La Ronda site to submit a bid on its demolition and removal or historic rescue.

"It's a fantastic place," he said of La Ronda, "filled with lots of detail."

Along with Jona Harvey of the Architectural Salvage Network, Hart spent weeks scouring the country trying to find someone interested in rebuilding La Ronda somewhere else.

"My hope was to dismantle all the key components . . . crate them all up, ship them wherever, and rebuild the house with modern materials and all the original historic pieces so it looks completely like it does today."

There were no takers, however, and Hart now thinks it's too late.

"Nothing would have excited me more than to see a story on the front page about La Ronda being dismantled and relocated," Hart said. "I poured so much of my heart and soul into trying to save this place.

"But I'm afraid it's too far gone now. The demolition and architectural-salvage contracts have already been awarded, and it would take a massive overturning at this point to change things. I seriously doubt the owner would even entertain it. He seems to be driven by speed."

And that, alas, is a problem.

"It could take three to five months to move this," Matyiko said. "It's a massive building. It's asymmetrical, with a tower and what looks like wide open halls. That makes supporting and moving the structure a little tricky. It's a real project."