Part 2 of "A Century of Parquet Pavements" investigates global distribution of wood paving blocks, the changes in technology of wood-block treatment, placement, and improvement, and the reasons for the disappearance of wood as a paving material.

"A Century of Parquet Pavements... Twentieth Century Decline: Geography, Technology, History: continues the investigation of wood paving in cities around the world as industrial societies grappled with the high noise levels of growing cities in the turn-of-the century decades when horse-drawn wagons and carriages were giving way to motorized vehicles astride pneumatic rubber tires. Until World War II bituminous asphalt and concrete were merely candidates for the role of major paving material in a world experimenting with a wide range of substances from rubber and cotton to iron and steel. Although few people in the 1990s have first-hand experience with wood block paving, it had a strong corps of advocates in the early years of the twentieth century and did not disappear until the heavy traffic of the war era clarified the demands of a society on wheels mounted on heavy, high-speed machines and demanded a far sturdier surface than wood blocks could deliver.

At the end of the twentieth century wood block paving is a curiosity. At the beginning of the century before inexpensive mass-produced automobiles made paving a high priority for governments of industrialized nations, wood paving materials offered a quiet, resilient, inexpensive, and easily repaired and replaced surface for steel-rimmed wagon and carriage wheels and iron horseshoes. Moreover, animal excrement did not penetrate treated wood blocks but dried to be blown or swept away Heavy traffic and noise were minor problems on country roads where planks were used to speed travel through wet areas and over small bodies of water. The Industrial Revolution introduced cast iron bridges, but wooden structures with their romantic roofs continued to appear over streams and rivers in rural areas unable or unwilling to finance ferrous metal structures. Cities looked to wood-block pavements to reduce the din of horse-pulled vehicles in streets canyoned with buildings.

The idea of pouring a roadway of asphalt or concrete was alien to road builders of the early twentieth century. Gravel and stone were spread over roadbeds but materials for a hard surface were usually laid like pieces to a puzzle. Bricks were popular for city paving, but they were expensive to produce, difficult to lay, nearly impossible to keep level, noisy, and retained oderiferous and insalubrious animal droppings. When asphalt was used for paving it was not softened and poured on the street but cast into blocks to be laid like brick with all the disadvantages except noise. Asphalt block pavements were as quiet as wood but the blocks disintegrated under the pressure of horseshoes and steel tires. Concrete was also used for paving but until trucks were developed to bring the prepared mixture to the paving site concrete was, like asphalt, cast into blocks to be laid like bricks. Concrete and asphalt blocks were less expensive than bricks, but they did not wear as well. Rubber blocks were the quietest of all pavement but they suffered the disadvantage of other blocks, they wandered and did so with greater fervor than other block materials.¹ Cast iron and steel blocks ere durable but they wandered, retained animal excrement, and magnified the clatter of ferrous wheels and shoes.² A century ago the choices for surfacing streets were bricks and other blocks and compared with the alternatives wood blocks were fetching.

As the twentieth century turns into the twenty-first paved streets and highways appear to fall into two easy-to-identify categories: concrete and asphalt. In fact engineers have a vast array of choices for paving. City streets in residential neighborhoods are very different from the interstate connectors that run around the metropolis even though they may all be asphalt or concrete. Foundation, thickness, density, and reinforcement have to be determined for each street and highway and often for separate stretches of the same thoroughfare. At the beginning of the twentieth century paving alternatives were more readily identifiable. Heavily travelled routes required thick granite blocks, heavy bricks, or squares of iron or steel. Lightly used residential streets were paved with thin granite, light bricks, or blocks of asphalt, concrete, iron, or steel.

The use of wood-block paving should be considered in light of the demands of turn-of-the-century streets and highways and not in terms of modern construction materials. Wood-block paving was not a failure, it disappeared because needs changed. Moreover, wood-blocks were not intended as an all-purpose paving material but a special substance for selected streets. City engineers did not envision a city paved with wood. They did consider wood blocks appealing for streets near hospitals, schools, churches, and public buildings like court houses where street noise was especially bothersome and in congested streets with heavy traffic. It is not easy for modern men and women to imagine the noise generated by hundreds of steel-tired wagon wheels and horse shoes on bricks, steel iron, or granite block streets sandwiched between multileveled buildings. A wooden pavement was not small blessing in the horse and wagon society. Wood blocks were also useful in filling gaps around trolley tracks. The flexible wood was less likely to crack, break, or wander from the vibrating iron or steel rails.

Wood-block paving was not a whimsy but solution to a serious urban problem. Wooden streets, like trolleys, are no more because technology offered new alternatives in transportation that eliminated the need for them. Until World War I a debate raged over the future of transportation. Was the motorized vehicle going to replace the horse and buggy? Or would organic fuel win out as people tired of motor car engine and tire failures?³ The was left little doubt that internal combustion engines would easily eclipse horsepower, but technological obstacles had yet to be surmounted before airplanes, cars, and trucks were so productive, dependable, and economical that horses and wagons and trolleys would disappear and railroads would be pushed to the margin of the transportation picture. During that hiatus wood streets were laid. By 1925 wood paving, like electric trolleys, was finished. Trolleys are fondly remembered, a few still operate – trolleys in New Orleans and cable cars in San Francisco, for example, and many cities operate motorized buses built to resemble the rail-bound coaches they turned into museum pieces – but mention of wood-block streets solicits snickers from a world that has forgotten them.

Geography – Despite its limited use for streets targeted for special attention, wood-block paving was used around the world. Figure 1, Global Distribution of Wood-Block Pavement by Nations, shows the ten nations whose experiences with wooden streets is discussed in the English language engineering literature.

Argentina – In 1913, with wood-block paving enjoying the height of its popularity, Engineering and Contracting published an extract of a paper presented before the London meeting of the International Road Congress by Claro C. Dassen, Director of Municipal Works, Buenos Aires: "Practice and Experience with Algarrobo Wood Pavements in Buenos Aires, Argentina."

In 1888 a French firm laid imported pine blocks in Buenos Aires with indifferent results. After another failure in 1894 native lumber was tried in 1895 in trials that revealed the merit of algarrobo and karri blocks laid on properly prepared foundations. The first blocks probably failed as much from lack of ground preparation as from faulty timber. After surveying their street, engineers placed granite curbing in a base of portland cement. (Nineteenth century experiments with block paving of all kinds showed pavers the importance of sturdy curbing to reduce the wandering of individual blocks.) The compacted roadbed was spread with six to eight inches of concrete (stone, sand, water, and portland cement) which was in turn smoothed with a thin layer of portland cement,sand, and water.

Dassen included sketches of block arrangements determined to reduce waviness and instruction on how to control wandering and other problems associated with streets laid with wood. "Experience has definitely shown that properly constructed algarrobo pavements last for 10 years in reasonably good condition. For the first six years after construction they hardly require any expenditure on maintenance, later on defects begin to appear."⁴

Australia – Sydney and Melbourne's nineteenth century experiments with wood-block streets generated attention and exaggeration in the engineering press of other English speaking nations. "The life of the pavement is estimated at sixteen years. It is used in the busiest sections of the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, and after eight or ten years of wear it is found to have worn off about one-sixteenth of an inch."⁵ Australian hardwood blocks found their way to London, New York, and Seattle where they met mixed reviews.⁶

Burma – According to a paper by J. Stirrat published in Industrial Engineering in 1898 street builders in Rangoon, Burma experimented with wood paving. In "Notes on Wood Paving vs Macadam in Rangoon," Stirrat reported on experiments with teak and pyinkadoe laid on a concrete foundation.⁷

Canada – Canadians, early users of plank roads, were also pioneer wood-block pavers who put down cedar blocks at least as early as 1888.⁸ Toronto laid several types of wood in 1895. "In June, 1901, City Engineer Chas. H. Rust reports, these different woods were examined with the following results: Beach, nearly all the blocks were decayed; maple, a few of the blocks were in good condition, but the majority of them had dry rot; rock elm, most of the blocks were in good condition ... soft elm, the blocks were all decaying; hemlock, the majority of the blocks were sound; Norway pine were in fairly food condition ... white pine were in as good condition as the Norway pine ... round cedar blocks were in better condition than any of the other woods."⁹

At the height of the wood-block paving era Toronto was a leader in a development of wood-block treatment. In "Wood Blocks for Street Paving: Their Treatment and handling," the editors of Municipal Engineering drew on Toronto in an effort to establish standards for wood-block treatment: "the Toronto specifications covers all the various classes of oil in use and may help to clarify the situation."¹⁰ Block paving was not limited to Toronto, in 1916, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, laid 2,000 square yards of wood-block paving and Ottawa put down ten times that amount.¹¹ In 1920, near the end of trolleys and wooden streets, Ottawa exhibited an advanced technique of laying wood blocks around city railway tracks to reduce the incidence of wagon and car wheels caught between paving and rails.¹² Winnipeg's wooden streets also received attention in the civil engineering literature.¹³

France – Paris was home to innovative street paving of many kinds, rubber, iron, steel, and wood. The French capital was held up as an example of a city that pioneered in construction that benefitted its citizens' comfort and health.¹⁴ Nineteenth-century technological advances that kept Paris on the forefront of wood-block paving were continued into the twentieth as other nations looked to the French for solutions to heaving, waving, blistering, bleeding, and wandering.¹⁵

"Berlin has probably the finest sheet asphalt paving in the world. Their wood paving is rough and comparatively noisy. About the only thing of especial interest noted in Berlin was that a new wood block plant has been erected where the Rueping process will be used for treating Swedish pine similar to that used in England."¹⁶

Great Britain – London boasted wood-block streets as early as 1840. Like Paris, the British capital pioneered resourceful paving. "Wood-block paving is [1915] in general use in nearly all of the several hundred boroughs of the United Kingdom whose population is greater than 60,000. Its growing popularity is due to the fact that it shows a longer life under motor-bus traffic than any other smooth pavement that has yet been introduced at an equal expense, to the ease with which repairs may be made, and to the absence of dust and noise.

"There are a few prominent cities, such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Dublin and Belfast where wood-block paving is not used except in front of hospitals and schools. In these cities granite sets are employed and their displacement by wood pavements is delayed because of the practice of shoeing draft horses with sharp calks, which tear up the wood blocks."¹⁷

In 1915 Canadians anticipated the end of World War I and sales of Douglas fir, white spruce, jack pine, and red pine for paving British streets. "The supply along the Grand Trunk Railway is unlimited, there being enough still uncut to pave every street, not only in Europe, but in the world ... The extent of this new industry can be realized from the fact that the quantity of timber used by Great Britain for paving in 1913 was approximately 60,000,000 feet."¹⁸ Wood is an "esteemed paving material in the English Cities. In ten of the twenty eight boroughs constituting the City of London, and comprising the most thickly populated sections of the city, the total mileage of creosoted wood block in 1912 was 121, and of this total 40 miles was in the city of Westminster, that part of London containing the best retail business streets; the government buildings, theatres, museums, art galleries, etc., the social heart of the city."¹⁹

"All the other English cities have adopted wood paving for some of their best streets. Liverpool has approximately 150,000 square yards; Birkenhead, 95,000; Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol, in fact all English cities over 50,000 population have wood block streets, and in the majority of cases these are the principal thoroughfares of the town."²⁰

Japan – In 1923, American City reported that Tokyo, Japan was paving with creosoted Douglas fir blocks "laid on a concrete foundation which has been covered by a layer of mortar ... No covering or top dressing is used. This method of laying the block is probably the reason why there has been some complaint about a portion of the wood block paving which was put down about a year ago. If these blocks had been thoroughly treated and laid as they are in Europe and America, the pavement would probably have lasted for then years.

"A very rough estimate of the percentage of various kinds of paving planned for Tokio [sic] to be carried out prior to the end of 1926 is as follows: present completed wood block paving, 1 percent; future wood b lock paving, 10 percent; and asphalt macadam, 32 percent."²¹

Switzerland – In 1900 U.S. Consumer Reports noted experiments with wood-block paving in Basle, Switzerland. Included in the Swiss project was pitch pine from the United States.²²

United States – Figure 2 depicts the distribution of wood-block paving across the United States by region. Wood-block paving projects in twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia were reported in newspapers and engineering journals. Some eighty American cities (not including Washington, D.C.) were involved. States and cities included may have laid wood block pavements, but they were not mentioned in major English-language newspapers or engineering magazines. Municipal Engineering reported in 1915 "150 cities using the wood block pavement, the amount so far laid being fully 10,000,000 square yards."²¹ Figure 3 lists the American cities that used wood-block paving.

The central theme of the engineering literature dealing with wooden roads is the performance of oils for treating the wood blocks. In Journal of the Association of Engineers Society (1892) T. J. Caldwell and T. D. Miller discuss St. Louis's treatment of blocks with tannin and zinc-gypsum. In 1902 Municipal Engineering reported on the plants used to treat wood blocks with kreodone oil for longer wear; P. C. Reilly, noted that kreodone also made wood blocks impervious to water, dryness, cold, and heat. "Wood Preservation with Asphaltic Material," relates "the success of the Santa Fe Railroad in treating ties with natural asphaltic oils from California and Mexico to prevent decay," and Engineering News published Clark R. Mandingo's "Creosoted Wood-Block Paving Specifications to Prevent Bleeding and Bulging". In 1915 Municipal Engineering set forth the history of treated wood block pavements in the United States, reporting that "one of the first creosoted wood pavements in Chicago was a section of long-leaf pine blocks laid in front of the auditorium hotel in 1900," and "nearly thirty miles of the most heavily traveled streets in Manhattan Boro, New York, are paved with treated wood blocks". In 1915, Hermann von Schrenk, in a presentation before the American Society of Municipal Improvements meeting in Dayton, Ohio, called for specifications for creosoting oil – "straight coal-tar creosote, additions of refined coal-tar to creosote, water-gas tars, etc." P.C. Reilly warned against the use of tars in creosote oil: "The serious results that follow the use of wood paving blocks, which have been treated with creosote oil mixed with tar, are well known to almost every paving engineer, chemist and contractor". And, in 1919, K. M. Waddell presented a paper that is available for treating wood blocks for paving.

Wood preservatives were widely used for paving materials and other wood products: "statistics compiled by the National Wood Preservers' Association ... show that during 1913 the consumption of wood preservatives by the 93 treating plants reporting amounted to 10-8,373,351 gallons creosote oil, 26, 466,803 pounds dry zinc chloride, 3,883,738 gallons miscellaneous liquid preservatives" increases over 1912 of 29.5, 27.5, and 26.46 percent.⁶³

After oil treatments to preserve wood paving b locks the topic attracting the most attention from engineers was foundation preparation. Nineteenth century wood-block streets sustained light loads on a dirt or sand foundation. Buckling, heaving, warping, and other problems were mitigated by undemanding traffic and shoddy construction. The blocks were put down on a poorly prepared surface without curbing. If loads exceeded the capacity of the blocks the paving shifted toward the sides of the road and the traffic was carried by the original dirt surface. Twentieth-century engineers carefully designed roadbeds and corralled their blocks with stone curbing that forced overburdened blocks to buckle or break under heavy burdens. remedies included oil treatment for blocks, to make them stronger and resilient, and improved foundations. It became common twentieth-century practice to carefully grade the roadbed, lay several inches of concrete–portland cement mixed with stone, sand, and water; until highway engineers learned to reinforced concrete with steel wire and wire and rods, that surface crumbled too easily to serve as a highway or street – then cover the concrete with few inches of mortar. The treated wood blocks were carefully placed on the dry mortar and wedged between permanent curbing.

In 1917, Walter Buehler, wood preservation and paving engineer employed with the Barret Company of New York, wrote in Engineering News-Record that hardened pitch was an improvement over dry mortar. "Possibly the general opinion as to the costliness of laying wood block on a pitch slayer has arisen from lack of actual experience with this type of construction, and perhaps also because of the erroneous idea that it is necessary to give the concrete base a 'side-walk' finish." Buehler directed pavers to allow the base to firm up before painting it with a think coat of pitch. Blocks could then be laid over the dried pitch and "rolled with a tandem-roller, which will be found sufficient to set the blocks in the pitch so that they will adhere firmly to it.⁶⁵ In 1920, Hermann Von Schrenk, in another presentation before the American Society of Municipal Improvements, reinforced Buehler's arguments for a base of pitch beneath wood blocks.⁶⁶ Ellis R. Dutton, a city engineer in Minneapolis, developed a technique for smoothing the concrete base before the pitch and covering wood blocks were added.⁶⁷

Lambert T. Ericson, contracting engineer, Jennison Wright Company, Toledo, Ohio, and Midland Creosoting Company, Granite City, Illinois; C. H. Teesdale of the Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin; and James A. McElroy, city engineer, Bridgeport, Connecticut addressed the treatment of wood-blocks already in place. McElroy writes, "A few years ago I suggested to one of the wood-block companies that they might devise some method of treating old blocks on the street. The cheapest scheme they should suggest was to take up the clocks and relay them with another type of cushion. They estimated the cost at $1 to $1.25 per square yard, exclusive of the cost of new blocks.

"It was then decided to seal the old wood-b lock pavements by giving them a surface treatment of hot road oil ... After a few days under traffic the treated blocks had the appearance of a new pavement, and although considerable wet weather has been had since the work was done, the blocks have shown no signs of buckling. This treatment cost $.10 a square yard for 5,000 sq. yd."⁶⁸

Continued in part 2b