BY ZACH MORTICE
Vitrified brick in Cincinnati. Image courtesy Robin Williams.
Uncovering historic pavements reveals each city?s ?urban fingerprint.?
In the past 200 years, cities have become larger, safer, and healthier places to live, but there?s one arena of urban infrastructure that has become incalculably more monotonous and denuded: the range and diversity of pavement types on city streets and sidewalks.
Before the dominance of concrete and asphalt, city streets were paved in a wild diversity of minerals and materials: glassy vitrified brick, wooden block, crushed oyster shells, rough-hewn granite blocks, and more.
Robin Williams, the chair of architectural history at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has traveled to 40 cities across North America to study their historic pavements and found a rich spectrum of street coverings that somehow persist with no preservation protections. His own city, Savannah, Georgia (an architectural historic preservation capital), has six extant types of pavements, with no regulations preserving them or their respective landscapes. ?Savannah has a greater concentration and variety of pavements in one landmarked district than any other city,? Williams says.
To ensure that this concentration stays intact, Williams is working with the city to draft a new policy or ordinance to protect Savannah?s historic pavements. ?The goal would be to protect all historic street and sidewalk pavements, curbs, and historic street features that are at l...