It's always cool to see old time video dictating the past of our East Texas cities. There's not much of it, really, which I thinks adds to how special it is to see.

The City of Tyler Youtube channel has raw video of the construction of the brick streets of downtown Tyler. As you can see, the streets were laid literally brick by brick. According to the Tyler Morning Telegraph, this was needed because downtown businesses didn't like the fact that their goods were dusty in the summer from the dirt roads outside and how difficult the wet roads were navigate in the winter to deliver goods from the trains.

Those brick streets still take up about 14 miles of roadway around downtown Tyler. Sadly, across the United States, these brick streets are disappearing simply because it's not very cost friendly to maintain them.

The Tyler Morning Telegraph also put together a video with some further details of how the bricks streets came to Tyler.

Tyler's downtown brick streets are a nice piece of charm for the city. Whether you're driving on them, as rough as they may be, or simply walking on them. It's nice to have that bit of history still preserved in the city.