try to visualize your hometown or the
city where you live what comes to mind
I’m going to guess that buildings parks
and monuments are part of this picture
and the street pavement is not we’re so
used to streets dominated by asphalt and
concrete that we’ve become blind to the
earlier historic pavements that survive
in cities across the country and we’ve
uh turley forgotten the critical role
they played in helping modernize and
make our cities livable for decades
people fought to save historic buildings
as vital part of our heritage but they
made no effort to do the same for street
pavement for a long time I was no
different as an architectural historian
my job has been to get people to look up
to admire the beauty and significance of
buildings we’ve all been so busy looking
up at the vertical expressions of our
past that we’ve become blind to the
remarkable heritage that exists in plain
after years of teaching in a building on
one of Savannah’s downtown squares
I eventually noticed this large
triangular pattern of blocks in front of
the building and wondered what is that
doing there at first I thought it was a
but then I learned it was there for a
much more practical reason to keep the
blocks oriented perpendicular to the
turning wheels of traffic my curiosity
about these blocks has blossomed into a
fascination almost an obsession to
understand and uncover the rich and
complex history of street pavement
across the country what I’ve discovered
as each city in town has its own local
pavement identity a kind of urban
fingerprint unique to that place from
the materials used to how and where they
were laid cities and even neighborhoods
can have a distinctive identity in my
opinion pavement is our most democratic
form of built heritage it’s accessible
to everyone and it bridges areas rich
and poor indeed there enough historic
having materials surviving in cities
across the country provide a bridge to
the Past helping us understand the
struggle to make our cities livable try
to imagine a time before street pavement
when all of our streets were dirt now
water mains no sewers no pavement just
dirt well the problem of getting stuck
in a muddy Street evidently was common
enough that it could be satirized as in
this view from San Francisco but
seriously dirt streets pose a very real
threat to the health and safety of the
citizens of any given city muddy streets
could impede the movement of
firefighting vehicles at a time when
devastating urban fires were commonplace
one needs only think of the great fire
of Chicago
and imagine the impact of thousands of
horses mules and dogs doing their
business in the streets the same streets
you’d be walking in solving the pavement
problem was part of a revolution that
transformed the city during the 19th
century while skyscrapers became the
most obvious symbols of this revolution
improving the infrastructure underfoot
as advocated by magazines like this one
on the right had a much more profound
impact on people’s lives on a day to day
basis so the story of pavement in
America begins in the 18th century with
cobblestones which arrived in port
cities as discarded ballast from ships
now these stones came from around the
world how do we know well here in
Savannah we have proof we have a stone
from China uniquely etched with Chinese
characters it started its life as a
tombstone in 1798 and by the 1850s had
arrived in Savannah by that time though
cobblestones were considered a crude and
even barbaric form a pavement ill-suited
to the real needs of a modern city
so if cobblestones weren’t the answer to
the pavement problem what was here was
the challenge facing cities you had and
it depended on a city’s geographic
location their budget and even the
function of any given street and you had
to decide what was most important for
that Street was it durability smoothness
being quiet or affordable since no
pavement could be all those things
cities experimented with a bewildering
variety of pavements which means
Engineers documented in color-coded maps
wood blocks appeared to be a promising
option they were smooth and cheap and
quiet it’s like magic but in wet weather
they were slippery and in southern
cities termites and humidity eroded them
quickly in the south meanwhile readily
available moister shelves were also
cheap and provide a smooth ride but turn
to clouds of annoying white dust a more
durable option were rectangular Belgium
blocks which were strong enough to take
the heavy cart loads of waterfront and
warehouse districts in cities like New
York and Baltimore and other port cities
but Belgium blocks they were bumpy and
worst of all they were incredibly noisy
under the metal hooves of horses after
eight after 1880 vitrified bricks became
the most popular and widely used
pavement material in America for the
first time here was a payment that was
durable and smooth it’s like magic and
unfortunately they’re heavy so it made
shipping them around prohibitively
expensive so brick manufacturing plants
also appeared around the country
stamping their names into the bricks to
declare their place of origin so here is
a brick with a distinctive sense of
place like these bricks from Ohio but
bricks could also be noisy so much so
that the residents of the small
community of Morgan Park outside Chicago
opposed the installation of bricks in
front of their houses and fought the
Town Council all the way to the Illinois
Supreme Court the development of modern
asphalt in the 1920s was game-changer
here is an here was a material a
pavement that was smooth affordable
and sufficiently durable that it quickly
became the payment of choice and was
spread over older pavements but at the
loss of local identity but not all
streets got covered take for example
this pair of red brick streets and
consider how they were saved on the left
is the street from a depressed area in
Fort Wayne Indiana where evidently
economic neglect has saved its bricks
while on the right representative of
many cities wealth and elitism have
saved the same bricks as in Savannah
where Jones Street is among the city’s
premier addresses from the 1970s onwards
heritage tourism has motivated the
restoration of the oldest and quaintest
pavement types as part of the
revitalization of abandoned waterfront
areas in cities like New York that you
see here in st. Louis and Baltimore but
outside such Torcy areas his syrup a
vent has rarely been considered part of
a city’s heritage happily there have
been some exceptions the residents of
the German Village area of Columbus Ohio
not only fought to save their houses in
the 1970s but also the remarkable an
extensive network of brick vitrified
streets when a City Road crew came by
and put asphalt down on those bricks the
neighbors literally took to the streets
brandishing garden hoses and shovels to
remove the offending blacktop in the
1990s historians in Philadelphia
compiled a remarkable survey of all the
historic pavements throughout their city
as the basis of a unique historic
district one on the theme of street
pavement one of the unexpected results
of this thematic district was that
residents in the poorer parts of
Philadelphia we’re surprised to learn
hey we’re in an histórico
strict and for the first time they felt
like they were part of the city these
two examples from Columbus and
Philadelphia illustrate the power of
Haven to activate civic pride and define
local identity but such pride in most
cities is powerless to stop the
indiscriminate removal of this
collective heritage even in Savannah a
city celebrated for its historic
preservation movement destruction occurs
without protest recently all of the
cobblestones from one of the city’s
downtown ramps were removed including
that Chinese cobblestone as part of an
effort to replace it with concrete
stamped to imitate cobblestones as you
see down at the bottom so what can be
done well some cities have been
proactive in saving and preserving their
streets in Orlando Florida for example
they’ve literally been scraping the
asphalt away to reveal the brick streets
beneath and in Wilmington North Carolina
just a couple of months ago they pass an
ordinance that will protect and restore
their brick and stone streets so whether
so this kind of heritage whether for its
heritage value beyond this heritage
value historic pavement or their modern
equivalents like you see here have the
potential also to be bridge to the
future these blocks provide texture that
can help with traffic calming as people
instinctively slow down when driving on
bumpy surfaces the gaps between the
blocks can allow water to percolate
below minimizing street flooding and the
patterns of the pavement can help people
especially the visually impaired
navigate sidewalks and crosswalks and
pavement who woulda guessed can even be
good for your health
as some researchers in Oregon discovered
well asphalt and concrete clearly have a
place in our world we should not allow
them to have a monopoly over our streets
at the expense of our heritage or our
well-being so in order to appreciate the
distinctiveness if you really want to
appreciate the distinctiveness of where you live just look down thank you