“This had never been done before,” says Mazzo. “Myself and my team, we had to come up with a way to stabilize the theater, cut it away from its foundation, lift it off the floor uniformly, then guide it through a system that guarantees its vertical lift and maintains vertical alignment.” No small task. Working alongside Urban vice presidents Adam Wall and Richard Falcone, Mazzo devised a lift system of hydraulic jacks on core beams inside caissons drilled into bedrock.

It was a brainstorm that paid off. “It finally occurred to me that the caisson configuration we install for the new building is an ideal prototype for the mechanism we need to lift the theater,” he says. “If I could figure out a way for the I-beam in those holes to emerge out of it, and be able to jack up and out to a height of 30 ft, I’ve essentially invented a 30-ft hydraulic jack.”

Tony Mazzo
Photo courtesy of Tony Mazzo

The innovation allowed Mazzo to use standard 600-ton-capacity hydraulic jacks that could be reset each time their 6-in. cylinders were extended. All of the 34 “lifting posts” were controlled by a single hydraulic manifold that kept them in sync. When it was time to perform a lift, crews only had to adjust the nuts on a set of threaded rods and plates—devised by Mazzo—that kept the load on the beam while jacks were reset for the next lift cycle. “We were lifting up [each] core beam by its boot straps, always maintaining it in place by running down the hex nuts on threaded rods,” he says.

Every 25-minute lift cycle raised the theater 5 in., and it took about 35 minutes to adjust all the equipment and reset for the next lift. According to Mazzo, it worked out to about 2.5 ft a day, or about 15 days of lifting to move the Palace Theater to its new home 30 ft up. A reinforced concrete ring beam around the perimeter of the theater’s floor with steel girders acted as a diaphragm to keep it stable.

“I can clearly tell you that this project—and I’ve been in this business for 30 years—was the most complicated and complex I’ve ever been involved in. I don’t think I’ll even be on something as complex as this again,” says Robert Israel, L&L Holding Company executive vice president. With the excavation, demolition, rebuilding and theater lift all happening in parallel, it was a highly unusual project, he says. “It would be tough to find another one more complicated.”