Moving Houses Up, Landward, And Down The Block

In the book “Sketch of Civil Engineering of North America,” a British engineer named David Stevenson details the move of a house by the “ingenious inhabitants” of New York City in the 1830s. The brick house, 25 feet wide by 50 feet deep, was to be moved 14 feet to allow the street to be widened. Stevenson notes that “the whole operation would occupy about five weeks” and took the effort of 40 men.

Today, that same house can be moved in two weeks with six men.

The move that Stevenson recorded was contracted for $1,000—it would cost more than $100,000 now, according to Guy Davis of Davis Building Movers and Stan Kazel of Dawn House and Building Movers, two companies with a veritable monopoly on the house-moving industry on Long Island. Combined, they moved or lifted more than 200 homes last year, around 50 of which were on the East End.

Both Mr. Davis and Mr. Kazel are the fourth generation of house movers in their families, an impressive feat in a time when just 3 percent of family businesses make it to the fourth generation, according to the Family Business Institute. Dawn operates out of Yaphank, and Davis out of Blue Point. They both service the greater Northeast, but just 13 miles separates their locations. Though most of their work is in higher density areas farther west, roughly 20 percent of their projects are on the East End.

“It’s not all mathematics and geometry—it’s really the experience the mover has,” said Mr. Kazel.

“Every project has its own challenges,” Mr. Davis said. “It’s an art, not a science.”

Though neither company keeps historical records, they have both been moving homes and historic structures on the South Fork since they can remember. “The towns are lenient with their moving permits,” said Mr. Kazel. “There’s a lot of open space,” Mr. Davis added. “You can sometimes jump the house through farm fields if the farmer will let you,” which lowers the overall cost of the move by avoiding power lines on the road.

In April, Mr. Kazel moved the Point House, an 1804 colonial landmark in North Haven Village, to another location on the same property to save it from demolition. The owner did not want to demolish it, but at the same time wanted to build a new house, and eventually the town granted permission to have two houses on the property.

In 2007, Davis moved six historic buildings to form the new East Hampton Town Hall. Owners Adelaide de Menil and her husband, Edmund Carpenter, donated 11 of their 14 historic structures to the town, most of which had previously been moved to their Further Lane property in the 1970s.

The same year, the company moved the iconic Big Duck in Flanders, which had been added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. Mr. Davis moved the 10-ton duck four miles back to the location it had previously been moved from in 1987 to make way for a new housing development that never was built. Davis had worked on both moves, almost 30 years apart.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, roughly 15 percent of Long Island homes are now on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood zone maps. Since homes in that zone need flood insurance for federally secured mortgages, many people have been forced to raise their homes off the ground or move them back on the property to lower insurance costs, to qualify for insurance at all, or to put their house on the market. “Now, 90 percent of our work is ‘Sandy work,’” Mr. Kazel said.

Business is “the best it has ever been,” said Mr. Davis. “There were about a dozen companies that started moving after Sandy,” Mr. Kazel noted, many of whom were in other fields of construction but wanted to capitalize on the demand. “After Sandy, a couple of these companies dropped some houses,” he said. “Now you have to be a lot more careful when finding a company.”

In all their years, Mr. Kazel and Mr. Davis said, neither company has ever dropped a house.

House moving has been going on in United States since the early 1800s—though one of the first recorded house moves in the area actually took place in 1794 in Amagansett, according to the East Hampton Conservators—and originally consisted of close moves in urban areas to pave the way for new streets. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, both Dawn and Davis likewise moved houses to make way for the construction of the Sunrise Highway, the Northern State Parkway and the Long Island Expressway.

Both companies had started moving houses in the 1920s, which, according to Robert Hefner, a historic preservation consultant for the Village of East Hampton, was also around the time people in the East End’s summer colonies began moving their houses from the main streets to more secluded rural areas.

Over the past 90-some-odd years, the basic strategy in the industry has not changed. Movers used to place dozens of manual screw jacks underneath the structure and support it with wooden timbers. Each jack would be attended by one man who turned a 4-foot rod, with the men taking great care to turn the jacks simultaneously to avoid cracking the house. In those days, a house could be raised only 1 or 2 inches a day.

Today, movers use “unified hydraulic jacking systems” that can be operated by one person. The system regulates the pressure of each jack to ensure that the house is balanced and raised steadily and evenly. They can now raise a house 1 foot every half hour, and there is no limit to the weight they can lift. Though most houses weigh 80 to 120 tons, Davis has moved brick buildings that weigh 800 tons.

Once a structure is lifted, it is placed on hydraulic dollies that can be operated by remote control. Mr. Davis said he would let his daughter pilot the control when she was as young as 7 years old.

“We have it a lot easier now,” he said. “It used to be really back-breaking work.”