late nineteenth century "souvenir" from the world's busiest corner discovered in basement

an uncanny find this week arrived in the form of a hefty, solid block of stone recovered from the basement of a wood frame cottage undergoing demolition near downtown chicago. the mottled, pink and gray rectangular block is a granite brick laid in 1883 at the center intersection of state and madison.

along with the paver, an accompanying newspaper clipping from 1978 (perhaps saved by the home's occupant or collector of the brick) expounded on its origin. a black and white photo from the sun-times depicts a man holding the stone, and underneath reads, "one of many who converged at state and madison friday morning to pick up a paving brick, stephen anderson found that he had to dig up his own 15-pound souvenir. workers who are converting state street to a shopping mall had cut away the concrete on the world's busiest corner but didn't loosen the paving bricks until later in the day. the granite bricks had been laid in 1883."

paving was fundamental to transport developments across the country. from the 1850's on, paving was increasingly utilized in urban centers, in many places first by way of squared granite blocks, acquired from european ships and then locally quarried. block paving, with its grooves, was thought to give horses a better grip than smoother concrete or iron. wood-block paving was popular in chicago prior to granite. pine blocks soaked in creosote (the heavy oil from iron-smelting works) would be laid like bricks over two layers of tarred planking on a bed of sand, then infilled with pitch and gravel. it supposedly made for a quiet surface, ideal for horses and pedestrians.

by the time of the chicago fire in 1871, however, there were 50 miles of wood-paved streets with which to alight the downtown area. still it wasn't until much later that granite pavers were adopted. by 1891 more than half of chicago's city streets were still using wood pavers, on over 400 miles of roads. even post-fire, wood paving systems remained mostly intact or in use, despite having supposedly fueled the conflagration. though cobblestone presented a technically more economical choice, chicago's lumber market allowed wood to remain a competitive choice.

the production of wood pavers finally slowed around the turn of the century when chicago and nearby cities exhausted forest resources in the surrounding region. wood pavers have in the past been unearthed beneath asphalt streets (as profiled in a previous blog post), but more common are brick or granite blocks, found on construction sites that dig beneath asphalt.

according to historical accounts, use of granite coincided in the late nineteenth century with the rise of street and cable cars (and the slow decline of the lumber industry). the new granite paving supposedly made for a noisy downtown area, filled with the clattering of horse and carriage, as well as the racket of transit cars traveling at unprecedented speeds. granite blocks were typically used for paving in the highest traffic thoroughfares in the city, so it makes sense that granite should pave the cross-street forming the base of chicago's address system. as evidenced by their extraction as souvenirs in the 1970's, the granite blocks were left underground and covered in asphalt during the 1930's, until major street renovations would require their removal.