The Montauk Theatre, a 1,750-capacity venue built in 1895, sat in the way of the Flatbush Avenue Extension, a 1907 project to widen and extend Flatbush Avenue to carry traffic to and from the Manhattan Bridge, then under construction.

Rather than raze the structure, the city bought the building and its site for $230,000, then sold it for just $11,500 to a company who undertook to move the theater to a site on the new Flatbush Extension. (The terms of the deal rose eyebrows at the time, as the company who re-purchased the building shared an executive with its original owners.)

An August 1907 report in Harper’s Weekly described the move:

“The remarkable engineering feat of moving the Montauk Theater in Brooklyn forty-five feet backwards from its foundations, turn it half around, and then slide it at a right angle, sixty-five feet more to front on another street has not only aroused the interests of engineers and architects, but vividly recalled the strange circumstances which prefaced the feat.”

The relocated building reopened in 1908 as the Crescent Theatre.