“Toynbee idea was the first thing I ever typed into a search engine,” Duerr says to the camera. It was in 1995 and ’96 that he started going to the public library to use the Internet. In the piece, he says the first time he ever noticed a Toynbee Tile was on South Street he was in a “squat on Fifth and Bainbridge at the time, a squat full of 17-year-old runaways.” He took a job as a foot courier with Kangaroo Couriers and started seeing them all over the city. Duerr, an artist, Toynbee expert and archivist, is the primary character in an award-winning 2011 documentary by Jon Foy called “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.” “From the pressure of car tires and foot traffic, and also the heat from the summer sun, which liquefies the asphalt ever so slightly,” you get a firmly-embedded mosaic tile melted into asphalt that emerges when the tar paper has eroded.Īnd what does it all mean? It’s what drove Justin Duerr mad with curiosity back in the early ’80s when he came to South Street as a 16-year-old high school dropout and runaway. ![]() “You have your carved linoleum, which is the meat of the sandwich, the mayo is crack-filler,” he told the Whitman audience, tar paper on the top and bottom serving as the bread. As Colin Smith described them Monday, they’re like a sandwich. The tiles themselves are about the size of a license plate and carved out of linoleum. Toynbee’s (the “Toynbee idea” reference) “Experiences,” published at the end of the ’60s by Oxford University Press. The timeline gets a start in the late 1970s with “2001: A Space Odyssey” (the “2001” reference) and a checking-out of British historian Arnold J. They’ve been dropped into streets with a markedly innovative technique from Boston to Kansas City and Detroit to Buenos Aires. There are hundreds and they’re not just in Philadelphia. ![]() All three convened at the Whitman Branch, 200 Snyder Ave., Monday to talk about their long-time passion - getting to the bottom of the meaning and source of mysterious mosaic tiles embedded into our streets with an extremely mystifying set of phrases: “Tonybee Idea. ![]() At least that’s what three devoted researchers discovered after years of hunting for a mysterious tiler responsible for the Toynbee tiles of Philadelphia. It all started right here in South Philly, it seems, on the 2600 block of South Seventh Street. An anonymous artist with a mysterious message that reached millions started it all in South Philly.
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