“I’m pretty sure we could have that down in a day,” company President James R. Verdin said.
Verdin estimated a cost of $100,000 to reinforce the belfry and then take out the bells.
Because the largest three bells—Mother Earth, along with a 6.5-ton and a 2.5-ton bell—won’t fit through the openings on the side of the tower, Verdin said, one of the columns around the bells would have to be removed.
“The issue is the cost of tearing that beautiful tower apart,” Verdin explained.
First, workers would build a steel structure around the tower to support it, Verdin said.
Then, the entrance to Lowell would be blocked for at most a few days while the bells are removed from the tower and lowered to the street.
Royal Eijsbouts in the Netherlands—which also claims to be the world’s largest bell foundry—is currently working with the University of Chicago to repair the Rockefeller Chapel’s 72-bell carillon.
The University of Chicago’s senior project manager, Kenneth D. Park, said that Chicago’s is the largest set of bells built at any one time and that lowering 53 of the bells from the 10-story tower for repairs will take about two months
Louis Bakens, who manages Eijsbouts’s international business, said that the Lowell bells will not be so difficult, because they are in a shorter tower and consist of many fewer bells.
In line with Verdin’s estimate, Bakens said that removing the bells alone—excluding the cost of structural renovations to the tower—would cost about $40,000. He also estimated the cost of shipping the bells to Moscow at about $30,000.
Even with the added cost of replacing the bells with modern instruments, the total price would likely fall below the million-dollar mark, the experts said.
Bakens said that replacing Mother Earth would cost about $100,000, and Verdin said that 17 similar bells could be manufactured for $510,000.
Arion Mancuso, the general manager of Crane and Rigging Services, LLC in Southboro, Mass., summed up the ideology of moving big things in 2003.
“There isn’t anything that can’t be moved—literally,” Mancuso said.