The Brick Streets District: Tyler's Urban Archaeology
Near Tyler, Texas
In central Tyler, there are streets that remember things asphalt has forgotten. The Brick Streets Historic District, anchoring the older residential heart of the city, covers twenty-nine blocks of houses and tree-canopied lanes where the pavement itself is part of the history. The brick underfoot, laid in the early decades of the nineteen hundreds, carries the texture of a different city, one built before automobiles demanded smooth speed over everything.
The district represents the largest single historic geographic area in Tyler, with buildings constructed mostly between nineteen hundred and the nineteen thirties. The houses along South College Avenue and Charnwood Street mix Queen Anne, Prairie, Colonial Revival, and Craftsman bungalow styles, a catalog of a prosperous small city's architectural ambitions across fifty years. Stone-lined drainage channels run along many of the older streets, built in an era when infrastructure was expected to be handsome as well as functional.
The brick streets themselves were a civic choice: they lasted longer than packed dirt and drained better than early concrete mixes in East Texas's frequent rains. By the nineteen tens and twenties, as Tyler's rose industry and railroad commerce brought real money into Smith County, neighborhoods south and east of the downtown square filled with houses substantial enough to carry mortgage notes into the next generation. Residents today have fought repeatedly to keep the bricks rather than pave them over.
The argument is always the same: the bricks slow traffic, tell a story, and make the neighborhood what it is. So far, the bricks have stayed.
