Construction Workers Lift NYC’s Landmark Palace Theater Off The Ground

The B1M is an architectural blog that takes a closer look at various happenings that are currently taking place.

As you might have expected, they are currently focusing their attention on an engineering feat that has captured the attention of New York City residents: The landmark Palace Theater in Times Square being lifted 30 feet into the air.

The decision was made as a means of clearing room for a TSX experiential performance space. Robert Israel of L&L Holding Company elaborted on the decision in the video below. In his words, the company was looking to update the corner but they did not want to demolish the theater in the process. It is always nice to see cities that are looking to preserve their most important landmarks.

“When we bought the property The Palace Theatre existed at the ground level…In order to create the retail footprint, we needed to move the theatre out of the way. Landmark status means we cannot either demolish or remove the theatre. With that in mind, we said, ‘okay, what if we lifted the theatre box in order to open up and activate the ground floor?” Israel says.

It is a refreshing mentality to see and this story is sure to amaze anyone who did not know that this type of movement was even possible. The plan was put into place and the process took all of seven weeks to complete. You will have to excuse our naivete here, we would have assumed that something like this would take much, much longer than that.

“Once the team was happy with how the equipment performed the main phase began on 14 February 2022. The hydraulic jacks lifted the theatre box in 12 centimeter ‘strokes’ after each of these movements a team of consultants performed a thorough inspection of the structure, before any work continued. After seven painstaking weeks the lift was finally completed on April 5th,” Israel continues.

The time-lapse video of this raise is an awesome watch, for sure. We can only imagine how fun this was to watch for those who reside in the city that never sleeps and got to see the changes take place on a daily basis.

Check out the video below: