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During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the grade of central Chicago to lift the city out of its low-lying swampy ground. Buildings and sidewalks were physically raised on jackscrews.

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.

Traveller David Macrae wrote, “Never a day passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine. Going out Great Madison Street in the horse cars we had to stop twice to let houses get across.” The function for which such a building had been constructed would often be maintained during the move, with people dining, shopping and working in these buildings as they were rollered down the street.

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Having Fun with Elvis on Stage is a 1974 spoken word concert album by American singer and musician Elvis Presley consisting entirely of dialogue and banter, mostly jokes, by Presley between songs during his live concerts, with the songs themselves removed from the recordings.

The album is unique in Elvis Presley's discography as it does not contain any actual music or songs; it consists entirely of Presley talking between numbers, recorded during live concerts.[1] Presley is frequently heard humming or singing "Well ...", which, during the actual performances, led into songs that were edited out of the recording.[1] Much of the album consists of Presley making jokes, although the recording is devoid of context.

Many critics felt that the album's material was spliced in a manner lacking continuity and nearly devoid of comprehensibility or humor.[1][3] Mark Deming of AllMusic states that "some have called Having Fun with Elvis on Stage thoroughly unlistenable, but actually it's worse than that; hearing it is like witnessing an auto wreck that somehow plowed into a carnival freak show, leaving onlookers at once too horrified and too baffled to turn away."[3] Nick Greene, a writer for Mental Floss, felt that the material presented on the record is "so incoherent, you don't really get an idea of his stage presence, despite the fact that all the audio comes from his shows."[1]

The whole thing's on YouTube and has been for a decade presumably because the Elvis estate is too embarrassed to copyright strike it: