Moving any building is no small feat. If the building happens to be an historic landmark that was built at the turn of the century the task is even more difficult. The Fairmont, a three story brick hotel built in 1906 in San Antonio, Texas is just such a building. At the time that this building was moved off it's onginal foundation it weighed over 3.2 Million pounds. The building was also 45 feet high. This historic move was accomplished by using 36 dollies with pneumatic tires. Seven fully loaded dump trucks were used as ballast weight to enable a TEXAS CRANE truck crane to winch the building forward 50 feet at a time. The cranes main hoist cable was wound through a series of four cable pulley's in order to reduce the line pull needed to the building to just 23,000 lbs. Once the Fairmont was moved off of its original foundation all of the wooden shoring placed underneath the building to to support its weight was removed by cranes and trucks. It was then moved to the new site and set in place for the building to be dollied back onto. The Fairmont was moved 5 blocks over city streets to its new location. It also was moved over a bridge which had to be reinforced. The move, which took four days from March 30 through April 2, 1985, cost $650,000. The hotel was restored at a cost of about $4 Million after placement in its final location about three blocks south of another landmark, the Alamo.

This amazing feat of engineering and ingenuity was performed by a moving contractor from Portland, Oregon who specializes in moving large buildings. It's hard to believe, but this was not the first commercial building that had been moved intact from it's original foundation. But it is the largest one ever moved. Texas Crane (formerly H&H Crane Service) was a subcontractor hired by the moving contractor to provide the crane that was used as the sole source of pulling force to move the Fairmont Hotel.

Because of the size of the building this move is now recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the heaviest building ever moved in the world. It was a unique event to be able to partcipate in and most surely is one of the more unusual crane and rigging jobs that the company has ever performed.