From the first Arizona Preservation Foundation "Action Alert" on November 15, 2006 to early this morning, it's been a wild ride to save the 1909 M. Edward Morin House. Dan Klocke, Roosevelt neighborhood resident and purchaser of the building, wrote the message below after getting a few hours of sleep from last night's move. Congratulations and thanks to Dan and to everyone who supported Dan in making this happen.At approximately 4:30 this morning the Edward Morin house began its next century at 621 North 5th Avenue. The house is still raised up on wheels, but is placed where it will sit for at least the next 100 years.
The journey could not have been better. For a trip that was supposed to take 4-6 hours to be complete in 2 1/2 hours shows just how great of a job everyone did. Almost every utility, traffic light, and streetlight was down by the time we pulled off the lot at 2 am so the house "cruised" through the downtown streets without stopping except for 10 minutes at the hardest crossing where APS managed to lift the high powered wires and get us through. I know it may sound a bit much and perhaps it is because I have not slept in awhile, but the City, APS, Cox, Contractors West, the city and county police, and of course the house mover Canyon State Performance, could not have done anything else to make it smoother. It truly was an amazing thing to watch -- and many people did. There is nothing quite like watching a house take up the full width of a street. I think many spouses were receiving cell phone photos around 3 a.m.
The next steps are to get the wheels out from the house and stabilize it. A foundation should begin in the next two months, as well as alot of the site work. Then once permits and certificate of appropriateness are approved for the porch a new one will be built and the interior clean-up will begin as well. The hope is to have the building done and a tenant in it by next July. Thanks again to all of you for working so hard to make this happen. There is a lot more work to be done, but perhaps the most daunting part is complete.
[Note: Click here for some photos and video snippets of the "historic" move.]
