The Bricks Speak

As Emanuel Silva was finishing erecting a fence, he paused to admire a red brick road revealed by the deep repaving occurring on Grand Avenue. He wasn’t the only one marveling at a newly unearthed glimpse of centuries past.

“Imagine all the work that the mason back in the day went through,” he marveled. ​“The time and the sweat on his hands and knees.”

The extensive repaving of Grand Avenue from Ferry to James, by the spot where Silva was working, is causing drivers to slow and in many instances swerve around now raised water mains.

The silver lining is that it is also revealing the 19th century surface beneath.

Even before he checked out the road Wednesday, Silva and his partner from Eagle Fence and Guard Rail looked up from their work securing the construction site where Mutual Housing is erecting affordable units.

Here to admire was an old field stone foundation that the excavation had revealed.

Silva took note of the road and the bricks in part because his father is a mason.

“I know [how tough the work is] because I know what he goes through,” he said.

At the intersection of Grand and Lloyd you could see not only multicolored bricks, with some of their original shadings still discernible, but a kind of brick path going on a diagonal to the far corner.

Was this a kind of brick crosswalk? At an angle? A 19th century version of the going-in-all-directions pedestrian crossing that we now have at certain busy intersections?

Hard to know, said City Engineer Richard Miller. But he said he guesses it is more recent, related to upgrades in mass transit of a century ago.

“I suspect it goes back to the early 1900s when the trolley line was put in place,” he said. ​“There is also the rails exist in the same areas where the brick work exists. We are not taking the brick out but will be paving over it as before. The brick seems to be stable to handle the overlay.”