Why we build on Tyler’s brick streets

If you live in Tyler you have driven on them: the red brick streets south of the square and through the older neighborhoods. We took them as the picture for this studio. Here is what they are, and why.

What is under your tires

In 2015 the city counted about 13.8 miles of brick streets, made of about 12.6 million bricks (Tyler Morning Telegraph, 2015).

Brick paving in Tyler began around 1906 at the railroad crossings (National Register nomination), and the streets were laid from the early 1900s into the 1940s (Tyler Morning Telegraph, 2015). The paving brick came from the Thurber Brick Co., the Mineral Wells Brick Co. and the local Tyler Brick Co. (National Register nomination).

They were built in layers: a concrete base, then sand, then the bricks (Tyler Morning Telegraph, 2015).

South of the square, the Brick Streets Neighborhood Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, covers 29 blocks (National Register nomination).

Every brick is worth keeping

The bricks are of three types, and none of them is made anymore, so repairs come from stockpiles (Tyler Morning Telegraph, 2015).

That changes how everyone treats them. A utility company that has to dig through a brick street must lift the bricks one by one and stack them for the city to lay back, and a city crew repairs the brick streets by hand (Tyler Morning Telegraph, 2015).

In July 2023 the city council approved the $873,961 “2023 Brick Streets Project”. The bricks are dug up and set aside, the ground is compacted, a new concrete base is poured, then sand, and the bricks are laid back and leveled by hand (KLTV, 2023).

It is the same order the streets were first built in: base, sand, brick. The bricks were never the problem. The base under them is what gets fixed.

What that has to do with a website

By hand. Someone kneels and sets each brick. We build websites the same way: designed and written for one business, in code, page by page, with no theme or page builder underneath.

Around one business. Each site starts from the business it is for: what it does, where, for whom, and what people need to see before they call. The look comes from its own trade: a delivery ticket for a concrete company, a row of nursery plant tags for a crew that does landscaping.

Meant to last. The oldest of those streets were laid more than a hundred years ago, and the city is still relaying them. A website doesn’t have to last a century, but it should be built to be looked after rather than replaced: light pages with little to maintain, and an editor so the owner can add new work without calling anyone.

A rebuild keeps the bricks

When we rebuild a website, we start the way the city does: we sort the bricks from the base.

The bricks are what’s worth keeping: your words, your photos, your reviews, and every address people already link to. The base is what sits underneath and nobody sees: which address each page says it lives at, whether the form actually sends, what shows up when someone shares a link.

So we lift the bricks and set them aside, fix the base, and lay them back, with every old address redirected to its new page. What we found on Marquez Concrete’s old site shows what that looks like on a real one.

Sources

• Tyler Morning Telegraph (2015): Tyler’s 13.8 miles of brick streets give East Texas town historic charm
• National Register of Historic Places: Brick Streets Neighborhood Historic District nomination, on the Texas Historical Commission’s Atlas
• KLTV (2023): Tyler City Council approves $870K historic brick street face-lift
• KLTV (2024): Tyler’s brick streets undergoing $874K repairs