CBC NEWS OTTAWA | By Arthur White Crummey

Ottawa's former city registry office was on the move Saturday, at the leisurely pace of about 3.5 metres per hour.

With a 149-year-old building, it's unwise to rush.

A team of engineers was scheduled to spend about five hours pushing the 500-tonne building 18 metres to the north as part of a plan to preserve, restore and embed it into a 21-storey tower just east of Rideau Centre at 70 Nicholas St.

The building dates back to 1874 and is one of about a dozen remaining registry offices across the province, according to Barry Padolsky, the heritage consultant at the site. It was part of Ottawa's former judicial district, along with the former Carleton County Courthouse and county jail.

"For the last 40 years, it's been vacant," he said. "And sadly so, because it's such a wonderful icon."

He explained how the team inserted a steel cradle under the building, with holes poked through the masonry to accommodate beams. Then workers jacked the whole structure up and slid it along rails at an imperceptible speed.

"They need a lot of hydraulic force to push it sideways, but it has to be pushed evenly. Otherwise it cracks, so that's what they're doing — and successfully," said Padolsky.

He said collapse is a risk. The vaults inside the building can be especially tricky. But everything seemed to be proceeding as planned on Saturday afternoon.

"It's, as we speak, approaching its final location, so I'm very excited about this."

The developer is Cadillac Fairview, which brought on Mammoet, a company with the self-described mission of moving "big objects," to play a leading role.

It previously helped install the containment dome over the destroyed reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The company also helped recover the Kursk, a Soviet nuclear submarine stuck in the 108-metre-deep seabed on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.

"So we're in very good hands," said Padolsky.

It would have been cheaper to deconstruct the building and move it in pieces, but both the city and Heritage Ottawa recommended keeping it whole as the best conservation option.

Restored registry office could host bar or café

The building had reached the end of the rails when CBC returned to the site on Sunday. Brian Salpeter, senior vice president of development at Cadillac Fairview, said it was successfully moved in two phases and is now in place.

But there's still more work left on the agenda. Padolsky explained that crews will have to dig a two-level parking garage around and under the heritage building. He called that "a major tour de force."

"The last phase will be transferring the city registry office from its temporary steel piles to the top of the concrete parking garage, and then the ice cream on top of that is restoring it," he said.

See this article in its entirety on the CBC OTTAWA website.

Related Reading: Historic City Registry Office Moves to New Location | Heritage Ottawa, July 21, 2023

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