Transferring 96-year-old House to Coronado Island Offers a Moving Experience

By Carl Ritter, Staff Writer

Squinting almost directly overhead into the bright blue late-morning sky yesterday from a walkway behind the Chart House Restaurant alongside a water channel leading into the bay, Margie Smith studied an intriguing sight.

A great old frame house dangled 100 feet in the air, suspended from a giant crane about 300 feet high.

The crane rested on a barge that two tugs had in tow. The house on high rested on two steel girders, held spectacularly aloft in turn by four steel cables. Slowly, ever so carefully, the tug began nudging the barge with its almost unbelievable cargo out around a spit of parkland and past a T-shaped pier where fishermen paused to ogle.

The house swayed slightly, side to side. “Mary Poppins turned loose,” a man with a notepad in hand heard Smith say. He laughed and dotted down the remark.

As he wrote, he suggested the entire unlikely scene also smacked of Dorothy and —“Wasn’t it her aunt’s house in Kansas?”—being borne aloft in a cyclone and bound for the Land of Oz.

As barge, crane and home-in-transit negotiated another cautious right-hand turn and headed into more open water, people on shore kept pace with the barely moving craft for quite some time, pausing momentarily now and again to permit their cameras to record this remarkable passage.

“Is this a first?” Smith asked. The middle-aged woman said she had lived in San Diego all her life and had never witnessed anything like it.

Aboard the barge was Chris Mortenson, who along with wife, Francie, owns the house that was being moved. A friend on shore shouted to Chris, saying he was offering the Mortensons “thirty-nine five” ($39,500) for the house. Chris waved. You knew he was grinning.

He had said earlier that the whole move was expected to cost the couple $120,000. The house, they had told The San Diego Union, would come to rest as their future residence on Coronado Island. It was built in 1887, the same year the Hotel del Coronado was constructed, and has been called the “Baby Del.”

The 3,800-square-foot, redwood structure, three stories high if you count the cupolas on it, was built by a schoolteacher who moved away abruptly after living in it for a year. A ghost story relating to the house and dating back through the years speaks of a child falling to her death from a cupola there.

Overhead wires in several locations had to be cut, and later spliced, to permit the house to be moved along San Diego streets and there was the red tape to be cut, too, the owners said.

The 80-ton structure was put ashore yesterday afternoon at North Island Naval Air Station, to be trucked to the lot, overlooking the sea at Isabella Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, its final destination. One of the 200 or so spectators who watched from the San Diego side of the bay as the old house completed its voyage said that in the distance it looked like a doll house suspended from a child’s toy crane or derrick.

Two elderly men, watching the early stages of the crossing near the Chart House and looking especially satisfied, exchanged remarks about the way houses were built to last in the old days. One said a new house probably could never stand such a trip. His companion agreed.

Truly, this was not the first such move across the bay. Records reveal that a sizeable house was barged from San Diego to Coronado in 1902. Fittingly enough, the Mortensons’ architectural gem, with its Queen Anne styling, will be set right next to its memorable forerunner.