THIS IS MY OWN EBAY SITE! MY HUSBAND MIKE'S EBAY STORE IS KNOWN AS "JUNKDEAL" AND HE HAS OVER 2000 POSITIVE FEEDBACK RATINGS! WE WILL BE SURE YOU ARE IN GOOD HANDS!!!
MIKE JUST FOUND PICTURES OF THE 2 PLACES HE WAS GETTING THESE BRICKS BACK IN THE '80s, TO GO ALONG WITH THE HISTORY STORY BELOW! FIRST 3 ARE THE VIRGINIA STREET FREIGHTHOUSE YARD, WORKING AHEAD OF THE TOLL ROAD LANDFILLING! THE SECOND 3 ARE THE UNION STATION ON BROADWAY! BOTH IN GARY INDIANA!
Mike has given me this listing to help boost my sales! He will narrate to me everything going on with these bricks and their history.
Most of Mike's life was spent in the salvage and demolition business. He grew up in Gary Indiana after emigrating here in the 1950s.
(Mike here). The history of these particular bricks is down below! Paving bricks similar to but not the same as the one above (the Townsend bricks were from the later second location described below) were removed by me in the years 1982 to 1983. I first cleaned out nearly every brick from the Virginia Street freight house yard just ahead of the widening and land-filling adjacent land along the Indiana Toll Road on the East side of Gary Indiana. I removed over 70,000 bricks! Sold them like crazy , and when I couldn't keep up with the absorption of the land as the project went on, I begin to palletize them and had Heritage Brick out of Chicago come with the large tandem brick crane and truck to get them out faster. They bought most of the bricks, as well. They were the best available and went for a high dollar!!
I later migrated over to the Baltimore And Ohio Union Station on Broadway at the very entrance to the giant US Steel Gary Works facility. (beginning in about 1985 until about 1991). Townsend Block bricks including the one pictured above were the bricks paving the grounds of that facility. There was no rush there, as the place was just abandoned, so every so often I went there on the way back from Chicago and loaded a couple hundred or so at a time and took them home. (I lived in Valparaiso IN). This was up to about 1988. Later, I moved to Chicago in 1990 and rented the house out. The bricks remained there until 2015 when I sold it. They are at my house in Crestwood IL today! Over 2000 of them! The best ones were in this batch, as I had been selling thousands of these bricks all along.
I must have gave people ideas, because after I started getting bricks for a couple years on and off at the Broadway Union, other people started up! So I ramped up and got most of the bricks that were easy to get there, about 25,000 of them! Once I was down to where they were covered over with sand or debris and people stopped bothering to get them, I slowed down again. Other than the ones I took home to store in Valpo, I sold them for a helluva lot of money! They were in that good of shape, and I took the best only! This was in 1988 into 1989, and even went back after I moved to near Chicago, in 1990, to get more as I had them committed to occasional sales. I put a lot of energy into getting the buried ones out!
Today the depot is an urban garden, and if the bricks left are even there anymore, they are covered and the property is secured. I had not got every brick there. An auto salvage yard moved there in 1991 or so and ended the brick free-for-all! The City of Gary Parks Department urban garden thing happened within the last 2 years, after the salvage yard closed.
NOW FOR THE HISTORY! The B & O Union Station was built in 1906 when Gary was brand new. There are photographs of these very bricks, Townsend Block of Zanesville, Ohio, being unloaded right at the station site from railroad cars! They were laid in 1906. And there they remained until 80+ years later when I got them out! I have added ANOTHER 30+ years to their age! Almost half as long as they were at Union!! They were probably made within 2 years before that 1906 date. At this point (2021) they are 115 years old or even slightly more than that!!!
The bricks are the best salvage examples out there, since the traffic over them was light and sporadic. Usually street bricks have wear. These have only the smallest defects. They were held in place by ASPHALTUM (a brittle type of tar), 2 dabs or so to each side, not covering the whole brick side. They were spaced with sand, not cement! Hell Gary was MADE of sand!!
Your brick, or bricks, will be as perfect a specimen as imaginable. Probably even nicer than the original photograph of the first one that was sold above, shows! I have so many, I can pick the best! They are absolutely clean of dirt after 30 years of rain washing them! The asphaltum I will knock off, especially out of the lettering. I'll even wipe them down with toluene or gasoline. A black stain might still remain that looks like a "spot" of black spray paint, but I will try my best to eliminate these spots! Only the tiniest chips might be on them, if that! They will look great!!!!!
I have found that the type of flint or chert-clay they were fired from is unique to certain areas of the U.S. Apparently, in the Midwest this would be in Ohio and parts of Illinois. Many of the best bricks were made in these areas! They have to be impervious to absorbing water, or they would soon decay and crumble from freezing and thawing cycles. The ACTUAL National Road through a good portion of Illinois through south-central Illinois on its way to St Louis (but stopping in Vandalia IL) were re-laid with such bricks during the very earliest part of the 20th Century! The original road was about the only serious road making its way west through the Eastern USA as far back as the 1810s! It was a partly "corduroy road" laid with logs split in half as a stagecoach and wagon route. It later was laid with Macadum, and then later, bricks, which held up much longer than Macadum under motorized traffic. The route West went through St Louis as about the only reasonable route to and then beyond the Mississippi. St Louis goes back that far, and arose just a few miles beyond the Western end of the route! Route US 40 roughly followed this road later!! TODAY, SOMEWHERE NEAR THE ORIGINAL ROUTE OF THE NATIONAL ROAD, NORTH OF THE TOWN OF AUBURN, SOUTH OF SPRINGFIELD, IL, A SHORT PRESERVED STRETCH OF HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE IS PRESERVED IN ILLINOIS AS AN EXAMPLE OF A FULL-SCALE ROAD LAID WITH PAVING BRICKS! I BELIEVE THIS SECTION IS LAID WITH THE FAMOUS MURPHYSVILLE BRICK COMPANY BRICKS!!! ONE OF THE HOLY GRAILS OF BRICK COLLECTING!! DESTROYED BY THE INFAMOUS TRI-STATE TORNADO IN THE 1920S, AND IT WAS REBUILT AFTER THAT AND LATER CLOSED FOR EVER!
Mike. (Dee here-Mike worked doing this with a gang of guys sometimes, he said. They got so, so sick of bricks at the Toll Road they made up a song while they worked......Bricks Is Love, Love Dem bricks!!! Mike said it came from a cartoon called Ignats.)