Updated!
Okay, so you know the White Tower on Central, the one that stopped being a burger joint some time in the 1970s? The one that’s better known to my generation as the QE2 nightclub, and to the whippersnappers as The Fuze Box? Well, it wasn’t always there. It moved around. Twice. This is a thing I did not know.
The pictured link in the White Tower chain was built in 1934 on Washington Avenue, just about where 111 is today. It leased the land from the Albany Catholic Diocese, on the original site of the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception. The monastery moved out to New Scotland Avenue and its building eventually became part of Maria College. White Tower bought the land in 1952.
In January 1962 the White Tower started its move up the avenue, getting about 40 feet closer to its current location at 12 Central Avenue. L.D. Dexheimer Co. of Guilderland moved it, concrete slab and all, to make way for a new Mechanics and Exchange Savings Bank building (now the Citizens Bank at 111 Washington).
“‘This moving job is nothing for us,’ explained a husky, healthy outdoorish John Dexheimer, the third generation of his family to continue the specialized business of moving buildings. It took a crew of seven and a lot of softsoaping to do the job. The task actually started last week when workers dug under and around the building’s eight-inch-thick concrete slab floor . . . Hydraulic jacks were put under the building to raise it . . . The building was then raised and freed from its basement block foundation. Wood ‘cribbing’ and ‘shoring’ were jockeyed and inserted under the building. Five solid pine timber beams were put next to the bilding’s concrete slab floor . . .
“Next came the softsoaping. Mr. Dexheimer’s crew slicked the wooden beams with cakes of Octagon soap. Grease was smeared on the timbers. Two chains were attached to the beams and to winches on trucks that stood nearby. A signal was given. Next thing you know the White Tower inched forward an inch at a time until all 40 feet were covered. This ‘sliding’ job took only about an hour.”
I’m not entirely clear how moving it 40 feet closer to the avenue accommodated the new bank building. Could it have simply sat in front of the new building? (Famously, incredibly, there was a White Tower parked right in front of one of Syracuse’s landmarks, the Gridley Building.) Here’s a photo of the White Tower as it was in 1935, from the Albany County Hall of Records. The wildly low resolution is their fault, not mine. Another view, from 1939 and showing the Rice home (now part of the Albany Institute) in the background, can be seen here. There was another White Tower in Albany, by the way, at North Pearl and Clinton, in addition to the one in Menands.
Anyway, it was only a few months later that the White Tower was moved again. Thanks to some sleuthing from the “Albany…the way it was” Facebook group, we’ve got another picture from the Knickerbocker News, Oct. 11, 1962. “The restaurant is moving to make way for the opening about Jan. 1 of the seven-story Mechanics Exchange building which towers behind it.”
So, were two moves always in the plans? Were they just waiting for the space at 12 Central to open up?
By the way, this is the monastery that existed there, shown in 1915:
