It is amazing to think that those bricks in the photo under the worker's feet first were laid down 113 years ago. The city moved on to asphalt after the bricks tended to swell or catch fire as a result of the primitive cars of the period which tended to spill gasoline on the street.
Years ago, a pile of the wooden bricks were kept in the yard of the Public Works Department, but over time they have disappeared or thrown out as trash.
But the streets downtown hold other secrets. Even before the wooden bricks were installed, a railroad trolley was operating in 1905 on 10th Street from St. Charles Street crossing Elizabeth and Washington streets along the route. Think about it. That was 120 years ago.
Brownsville is considered to be the second most historic city in Texas and reminders of how long we've been here are right under us.
Sometimes, unfortunately, we tend to forget the incredible artifacts of our past. With SpaceX here – the next mode of transportation to the moon and beyond – we tend to overlook what's already here.
"We can live with rockets and dreams, but reality, what does it mean?"
10 comments:
Why so much emphasizes to the downtown area? Who are the property owners in that area? Could this be part of the corruption going on in the city?
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We are sitting on a treasure or a pile of trash depending your perspective.
Nevermind that shit, Mongo
The Epstein files are probably
going to permanently disappear
before too long.
“Gee, I wonder how they got lost?”
Or even an admission that they were destroyed.
Boys, not much would surprise me anymore.
If Donald Trump weren't president the US would have peace, prosperity and hope for the future.
We have none of that now.
I am being clear and honest, the most I've been in years.
What do you think when names like this just know a few X mayor Tony Martinez; Trey Mendez.Question The case in the Arby's Bakery were found guilty of Harboring illegals the jury made their decision OK fine.But what ever happen to Lolas Bistro when ice took a waiter and the cook and for some reason the owners were in Cancun vacation.Oh really nothing happen to them,no charges nothing cause theX mayor Tony Martinez is the locations owner,wel. well
Wow
Picture it Brownsville’s downtown, a necropolis under open sky, old pine bricks slick with creosote, still sweating the ghosts of Model T gasoline fires. Every street an artery pumping the slow black blood of history, every brick a mummified tongue whispering market prices from 1912. The property owners? Shadows in air-conditioned chambers, nameless pharaohs guarding deeds like ossuaries, smiling in sepia.
The city fathers talk “revitalization” like a priest talks transubstantiation the wine is blood, the bread is flesh, and the asphalt is your tax dollar poured hot and steaming into the old street’s mouth. Contracts spiral down a sinkhole of cousins, campaign donors, and rotgut deal-makers. Someone says corruption. Someone else says progress. Same mouth, different lips.
Walk down 10th Street and you smell it old wood, old sweat, and the acrid tang of the present day trying to burn off the past. A trolley clatters in the skull, rails humming under your shoes. Look close: the iron butterflies still grip the phantom rails, wings rusted but not broken. They’ll outlast all of us.
Downtown isn’t just a place. It’s a living crime scene and a museum exhibit fused together, running on nostalgia, rent, and the blood-plasma money of the desperate. You can sweep the homeless into corners, paint the walls bright, put a jazz trio in the plaza but the bones are still under your feet, clicking like teeth in the dark. And somebody, somewhere, owns them.
Some time or some day we will all join them.
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