Blue Tile Project - Houston, TX
Recently, I went down to Houston with my friend Dana to attend 2016 Past Forward conference, a gathering put together by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It was a fantastic event that is worthy of several posts on its own. One of the connected events was a walking tour hosted by Joey Sanchez, founder of the Blue Tiles Project.
From the Blue Tile Project website:
One day on what seemed like a typical bike ride around Houston for Joey and Kelly Sanchez, an idea was crafted. The two began photographing all of the blue tile street signs along their route. This led to them uncover these hidden gems all over the city of Houston. As a result, on May 1, 2015, the Blue Tile Project was born.
Joey Sanchez greets the attendees for the Blue Tile tour.
In brief, these cool dudes are doing what they can to catalog and preserve the historic blue tile markers that are found around many parts of Houston. "It is documented that the blue tile street signs first appeared on the streets of Houston in the early 1920s. A young city at that time, these blue tile street signs are the original street markers of the first paved streets of Houston.".
On Friday afternoon, after the wonderful luncheon in which we got to listen to Theaster Gates, one of my new heroes, we set of on our walking tour.
We didn't get far!
We saw a grand total of two intersections with tiles before the rain hit.
For this post, I took pictures of actual humans, something very rare for my urban posts. I normally tell my story of a city or neighborhood through the pictures of its buildings and edges but Joey and his team have done such a great job of cataloging as many of the tiles as they possibly can. You can see so many of them on their Instagram page. They've taken a lot themselves but also have had a ton of submission by others. Or, check out HERE and all the others that folks have tagged them using #BlueTileProject. The best resources, though, are the iOS app and the master map that they've created. Super cool stuff.
We sorta expected the rains to come so we had a curtailed route that was shorter than the planned one. When the rain hit, we were barely into the shortened route so we had to shorten it even further. We had the perfect place close by to lend us shelter, The 8th Wonder Brewery. There, Joey gave us a much fuller description of the project and introduced us to a few of his friends, both with the project and the brewery.
Go to their website and spend a few minutes sniffing through the history that these folks have uncovered and you'll learn more about what the future holds for the project. Also, go Like their Facebook Page, and get all the updates on this fantastic project that is helping to save a wonderful piece of Houston's history.