In the year 1870 a man by the name of Mordecai Levi, of Charleston, WV, had an idea for improving upon the hardpacked dirt streets of the city. Every Spring they turned into a quagmire of mud and, to be blunt, a not insignificant amount of horseshit. The auto was still decades away from not only it's invention but its widespread use. Why not use bricks instead? He paved Charleston's Summer Street that year, and with financing from a partner managed to pave an entire downtown block 3 years later. That arcane piece of historical trivia is noteworthy for only two reasons. It was the first time in all of America that brick had been used by a city to pave its streets, and it is probably the only "first" that Charleston, WV can lay claim to.
Within a short span of 25 years, what started out as an experiment in Charleston had become the norm in cities, both great and small, throughout the United States. By 1900 Philadelphia had the most extensive network of brick paved streets in the country...some 135 miles worth. That, my friends, is what they call a lot of bricks. How many? It takes half a million bricks to pave one mile of road that's 25 ft wide. So, Philadelphia alone used some 68 million bricks by 1900 on its streets.
Most of the main streets in my own home town in Southeastern Ohio were paved with brick, and many of them are still there. The ones that haven't been paved over are actually in better shape than most of the asphalt streets. And they look nicer, too. There's just something about a brick street that lends character and charm to many city districts, be they residential or downtown. Here's a photo taken in a Nebraska town that could just as easily have been taken in the town where I grew up:
It makes one wonder (okay...it made ME wonder)...where did all those bricks come from? Who made them? Who laid them? What happened? Are brick streets simply a relic of the past, or a darling of urban preservationists, or mightn't they have a place in the future? Does a technology, once displaced and supplanted, have any future? And does anyone even care?