 Many of central Chicago’s hurriedly-erected wooden frame buildings were now considered inappropriate to the burgeoning and increasingly wealthy city.Rather than raise them several feet, proprietors often preferred to relocate these old frame buildings, replacing them with new masonry blocks built to the latest grade.Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them "en bloc"—on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.