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Apr

27

under the streets part I

Filed Under Uncategorized 

via City Walker by Lydia Heard

While the digital city building continues, it’s good to take a break and get to the real bricks and mortar city – bricks, in particular. There are still bricks under many Seattle streets, fire-hardened road bricks that last forever and are sometimes briefly uncovered during road resurfacing projects. They are abraded by the asphalt removal machines, and fragmented by every utility project that trenches through and is filled with concrete afterwards, leaving a patchwork of brick and other paving surfaces. The brick is a wonderful material from a slower time, and is still the pavement on Pike Place and the Pike and First intersection, making a washboard sound when vehicles drive over them, letting drivers know that this place is not the typical engineered-for-autos route and encouraging them to slow down. It’s a sad sight when progress finally catches up to the old brick and it is torn out entirely for a new concrete roadway, which handles heavy bus traffic and weathering better than pothole-prone asphalt.

Sometimes the brick wins out. During a resurfacing project on McKinney Avenue in Dallas, Texas, not only were the remnant areas of the old bricks uncovered, but also the original streetcar rails down the center of the street. This led to bringing back the old streetcar line with vintage cars, redesigning the street as the slow-paced streetcar commuter corridor it once was, and revitalizing the ailing neighborhoods that were once the premiere streetcar suburbs for the city. The street was resurfaced with new brick, and the remaining old bricks were used for crosswalks, intersections, transit stops and sidewalk accents. It was quite an amazing and effective transformation.

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