How Historic Street Pavement Modernized the City | Robin Williams | TEDxSavannah
[Applause] 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 view under our feet 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 giant yield sign 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 like this one you see from Washington DC 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 you