Tiny, beloved ‘Up’-like house trundles to new home on Sunday
Tiny, beloved ‘Up’-like house trundles to new home on Sunday
The wheels of progress don’t typically slow down to save a small, old house on a corner lot, but there was something about this Oakland home.
It had a story, not a particularly historic or notable one, but rather the kind that makes a good movie.
Way in North Oakland has sat on the same lot for 81 years, watching the roads get bigger, the BART tracks spring up, and the buildings and parking garage of the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland grow around it, its aging owner refusing to sell.
The tiny home, like the “Up” house, was scheduled for demolition unless the hospital could find someone to pay the six-figure price to load the three-bedroom home on a truck and haul it away.
[...] after a Chronicle article in June, interested house movers came out of the woodwork.
“We got a lot more response than we ever expected,” said Doug Nelson, the hospital’s executive director of development and construction.
[...] the hospital picked the perfect candidates, two couples who own a fourplex with a large piece of empty land zoned for a residential building just one block away.
On Sunday at the crack of dawn, the little house will be loaded on a truck, pull out of the driveway, cross under the BART tracks, turn left and travel a bit down the block to its new home.
[...] once it arrives on the new site, it will need a foundation and upgrades to meet city building codes — another $100,000 or so.
Lawrence Bossola, the former owner who had refused to sell his childhood home, would be happy, said Al Gavello, of his friend.
[...] while the hospital has plans to build a $50 million, six-story outpatient office building on the site, no one wanted to tear the Bossola home down.
Hospital officials had hoped to send the little house off with a big bunch of balloons tied to the top — a la Pixar — but it turns out balloons under the BART tracks, given the very small window of clearance, is a bad idea.
[...] it’s a fairy-tale ending for the little corner house.
Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.