Houston man on a mission to document the city's vintage curb tiles

Houston resident Joey Sanchez is on a mission to locate and document every one of Houston’s surviving vintage blue curb tiles. Some were installed nearly a century ago and most have been lost to urban development. Sanchez takes photo submissions via his official website and an Instagram hash tag, #BlueTileProject. less Houston resident Joey Sanchez is on a mission to locate and document every one of Houston’s surviving vintage blue curb tiles. Some were installed nearly a century ago and most have been lost to urban ... more Photo: Jose Sanchez / Blue Til Project Photo: Jose Sanchez / Blue Til Project Image 1 of / 110 Caption Close Houston man on a mission to document the city's vintage curb tiles 1 / 110 Back to Gallery

If you have spent anytime walking around Houston’s downtown area and the adjacent neighborhoods, you may have noticed vintage blue curb tiles announcing the names of the streets on each corner.

A man named Joey Sanchez, a Downtown Houston resident and avid bicyclist, is looking to collect photos of as many of these iconic blue tiles in the city as he can.

He’s started Instagram and Facebook accounts to collect the photos from his followers for the Blue Tile Project.

Sanchez became enthralled with the vintage blue tiles on bike rides, but just recently began capturing photos of them that are still surviving in Montrose and the Heights.

One side of Chris Shepherd’s award-winning Montrose restaurant Underbelly is a tribute to the tile font. It not unusual to see tourists and locals alike taking photo of it after their meals.

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“I see the type face as an iconic piece of Houston history,” says Sanchez, who hopes his project can help preserve the memory of the tiles – most of which have been destroyed in the usual process of construction and urban renewal – before they are gone for good. The city’s latest sidewalk initiatives have also laid waste to many of them.

The tiles, just like the cross-street stone pillars you can sometimes still see standing in quieter neighborhoods, are living on borrowed time in a city that is in constant reconstruction.

No doubt both the tiles and pillars have made it the private collections of Houstonians.

“Houston is not always so good at preserving its past but maybe I can bring about a resurgence of the tiles,” he says.

Sanchez has also created a Google Map widget on his official site to locate each of the tiles that remain.

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According to a posting on the Houston Architecture forum in 2009, most of the tiles were installed pre-1940 and made by The Mosaic Tile Company. Some were still being laid by the early ‘50s, according to some.

James Glassman’s Houstorian history site uses the tiles and font for its official logo.

It’s said that once cars became the norm in Houston, city moved to traditional street signage you could see from your driver’s seat.

You can submit photos to Sanchez’s project on Instagram using the hash tag #BlueTileProject. Sanchez is also taking submissions of addresses of where you can still find tiles in the wild on his website.