Michael Styborski looks around a neighborhood in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Michael Styborski looks at a handmade blue and white New Orleans street sign at New Orleans Street on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Michael Styborski takes a photo of a blue and white-tiled street sign in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Photo of Prosper Lamal, from the 1894 book titled 'Campbell's illustrated history of the World's Columbian Exposition : compiled as the exposition progressed from the official reports, and most profusely illustrated with copperplate engravings,' by James B. Campbell
The 6 X 4-inch tiles were made from white and blue cement. The encaustic method caused the colors to penetrate deep into the body of tiles, making them resistant to wear. Clip from the Daily Picayune, Nov. 17, 1886
A street sign on a curb at New Orleans Street in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
A street sign on a curb at New Orleans Street in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Michael Styborski pulls the tall grass overtaking a New Orleans street sign at New Orleans Street on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Michael Styborski looks around a neighborhood in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Michael Styborski uses a small brush to sweep clean dirt and debris over a blue and white-tiled street sign in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
The intersection of New Orleans and N. Galvez Streets includes several original street tiles that were apparently carefully removed and replaced when wheelchair ramps were installed sometime in the past. Not all were perfectly intact.
The intersection of New Orleans and N. Galvez Streets includes several original street tiles that were apparently carefully removed and replaced when wheelchair ramps were installed sometime in the past. But among the original encaustic-style cement tiles was this replacement -- possibly homemade -- ceramic tile, made with painted slip lettering. "How cool is that?" declared Michael Styborski, when he discovered the counterfeit.
Michael Styborski looks at a handmade blue and white New Orleans street sign at New Orleans Street on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Michael Styborski takes a photo of a blue and white-tiled street sign in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
A street sign on a curb at New Orleans Street in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Michael Styborski pulls the tall grass overtaking a New Orleans street sign at New Orleans Street on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
For more than a century, street corners in the older sections of the Crescent City have been marked with names made from embedded alphabet tiles. The Wordle of street names lends a certain genteel, old-fashioned charm to any stroll. Like beignets and Mardi Gras beads, they are among New Orleans' iconic images, a signature of the City That Care Forgot.
But these days, the tiles may be in trouble. With widespread street repairs unfolding around them, tile-lovers are concerned that when the dust settles and the cement trucks finally retreat, many of the tiles will permanently disappear with them.
The Louisiana Landmark Society, an organization devoted to the preservation of architectural marvels, recently listed “iconic New Orleans detailing,” including street tiles, on its 2022 list of the area's nine most endangered architectural features.
Despite our affection for these alphabet tiles, it’s hard to find out much about them. A Google search serves up a few shards of knowledge, but nothing very detailed. You’d think nobody ever really looked into their history.
But you’d be wrong.
Michael Styborski, 55, is a ponytailed amateur historian who believes he’s sleuthed out the origin story of our beloved street tiles. He believes he’s pinpointed how old they are, where they came from, and who brought them here. With Google Earth and preternatural patience, Styborski has figured out how many unique name plates are still out there and how many have disappeared in recent years as he’s tried to determine the degree of their endangerment.
Michael Styborski looks around a neighborhood in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Styborski lives in Kenner. He arrived in the New Orleans suburb with his family from Birmingham, Alabama, as a 10-year-old in 1977. Among the many things that enthralled him about the area were the antique blue letters that marked the streets in the older parts of New Orleans. Somehow, the street tiles spoke to him.
“I just thought they were the coolest thing,” he said.
After Katrina, Styborski’s interested in the tiles peaked. There’s nothing like widespread destruction to make you appreciate the stuff that endures.
Styborski, a freelance artist, photographer, comic book collector and enthusiast for the aesthetics of NFL logos, planned to express his devotion to the tiles by producing a computer font that mimicked their unique look. Wouldn’t it be cool, he reasoned, if you could send emails in New Orleans’ most signature typography?
The trouble was Styborski's craving for detail. His font never got off the ground because he over-detailed the individual tiles with authentic cracks and other evidence of wear. His font just took up too much digital space to be practical.
A street sign on a curb at New Orleans Street in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
But that’s not the important thing. As Styborski set out to create his font, he sought out the backstory of the tiles. “I figured the Internet had answered all the questions,” he said.
Not so. No one seemed to know basic information about the tiles. When were the tiles installed? How did that come about?
Styborski abhorred the vacuum of knowledge that he discovered and set out to fill in the blanks. In the past dozen years or more, he said, he’s amassed enough information from various archives to produce a book on the subject.
The only reason he hasn’t is that he’s worried that there’s still more to learn, and that some of his conclusions are based on conjecture, not absolute facts. He likes to emphasize that all of his assertions are “to the best of my knowledge.”
Styborski said we probably owe our beloved street tiles to a Belgian dude named Prosper Lamal, who came to New Orleans in 1884 to manage the Belgian exhibit at the World Cotton Centennial in what’s now Audubon Park.
By the end of the fair in 1885, bearded and bespectacled Lamal had fallen in love with a D.H. Holmes department store clerk named Marie Grandmont. The couple got hitched, and, as so often happens, a visitor became a life-long New Orleanian.
Photo of Prosper Lamal, from the 1894 book titled 'Campbell's illustrated history of the World's Columbian Exposition : compiled as the exposition progressed from the official reports, and most profusely illustrated with copperplate engravings,' by James B. Campbell
Styborski discovered that Lamla became a successful importer, shipping in tons of paving stones, among other things. One day, the newly invented lightbulb apparently went on over the Belgian's head. What if, he asked himself, New Orleans began marking the identities of its thoroughfares and landmarks with street tiles?
Styborski said he can’t be sure if Lamal had seen such street names in Europe. But Styboski’s research tells him that Lamal may have recognized a need for the street tiles, because “he came over for the World’s Fair, at the same time New Orleans people were complaining 'Why can’t we have better street marking?'"
According to Styborski's research, Lamal laid some sample cement tiles in the French Quarter, at a pool hall, a bank and beneath the feet of the hoity-toity membership coming and going at the Pickwick Club. Not long after, the competitive contractors who were laying the sidewalks in the burgeoning Queen City of the South began offering street tiles as a “value-added” service.
“I think that once one contractor started to put them in, then others said, ‘We’ve got to up our game,’” Styborski said.
The 6 X 4-inch tiles were made from white and blue cement. The encaustic method caused the colors to penetrate deep into the body of tiles, making them resistant to wear. Clip from the Daily Picayune, Nov. 17, 1886
Styborski said he’s found evidence that the sidewalks of Milan and Baronne streets were marked with tiles in 1893. Those would have been early examples, if not the very first, he said. Each tile, most of which are 4 by 6 inches, cost a nickel.
With that, carriage drivers, horsemen and pedestrians could find their ways around better. Stores, services, and apartments could mark their doorways. By the fin de siècle, a tradition had taken hold.
Most of us probably assumed that the city stipulated the tile street names. But Styborski said that, as best he can tell, local government did not have a role in the spread of street name tiles.
“I’ve seen nothing that says the city ever mandated it,” Styborski said.
He believes it was always a private, inconsistent operation. Not surprisingly, the first of the signature blue and white tiles came from Belgium. Later there was American competition. Styborski said the American-style tiles were made in Zanesville, Ohio, and have pinstripes around the letters.
The intersection of New Orleans and N. Galvez Streets includes several original street tiles that were apparently carefully removed and replaced when wheelchair ramps were installed sometime in the past. Not all were perfectly intact.
The street name tile fad was a rather short-lived phenomenon. Lamal died in 1895. By the Roaring 20s, the streets were be[1]ginning to be the province of the Model T, futuristic pole-mounted street signs had begun popping up at corners, and the fashion for sidewalk tiles was dimming.
In a 1951 editorial in the New Orleans States newspaper, a Miss May Genevieve Nelson suggested that the tile street names custom be continued “as the city lays out new subdivisions.” But Styborski said that in the same year, he found a newspaper notice in which a contractor was selling off 50,000 tiles, just to get rid of them.
The fading of the fad is apparently why you generally don’t see the tiles in newer sections of the city. If the sidewalks were poured after the Truman administration, they’re probably tile-less.
Styborski said that lamenting the loss of street tiles is nothing new. Every few years a story pops up in the paper about the loss of these humble historic relics. About 10 years ago, Styborski set out, camera in hand, to document all the remaining tile installations.
Michael Styborski uses a small brush to sweep clean dirt and debris over a blue and white-tiled street sign in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
“I put in the legwork," he recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll just take photos of all of them.”
“Then I tried. I’d spend a day and get eight streets. But I knew the streets and tiles went on endlessly.”
By the time he’d collected something like 20,000 photos, it dawned on him that there might be an easier way. Styborski said he discovered that street tiles were visible from the satellite view on Google maps. Not legible, but visible.
Starting two years ago, Styborski counted the tiles he could find on the 2019 Google satellite maps, and compared them to those visible on the maps from 2007. The survey was his COVID quarantine project, he said.
By Styborski’s count, we lost 796 tile street labels in the past five years, or 17 percent of what remained after Hurricane Katrina. In 2021, he counted 5,627 street names in the city, composed of 43,466 tiles.
Like someone piecing together a broken street tile, Styborski appears to have reassembled a small but precious part of New Orleans history. But he’s quite humble about his discoveries. He’s quick to point out that there are gaps and possibly flaws in his study of the subject. Regularly he’s posted his findings on a Facebook site titled “Legacy Street Furniture of New Orleans,” where other enthusiasts for our street naming arcana are able to comment and even contradict him.
Nonetheless, the tale of Prosper Lamal remains mostly unknown. In a recent telephone conversation, Tulane Professor and Crescent City cartography authority Richard Campanella said he’d never heard of Styborski or Lamal, and he wasn't aware of any detailed account of the genesis of the street tiles for that matter. But, he said, Styborski’s telling of the story would certainly align with the rapid development in the city at the turn of the 20th century.
Styborski agrees with those who believe the wall-to-wall construction that’s going on currently is a street name tile crisis.
“I don’t know why anybody would respect street tiles,” Styborski said. But disregarding them implies “a lack of respect for the past.”
“With so many of them broken,” he said, “someone looks down and says ‘If the city doesn’t care, why should I?’”
The intersection of New Orleans and N. Galvez Streets includes several original street tiles that were apparently carefully removed and replaced when wheelchair ramps were installed sometime in the past. But among the original encaustic-style cement tiles was this replacement -- possibly homemade -- ceramic tile, made with painted slip lettering. "How cool is that?" declared Michael Styborski, when he discovered the counterfeit.
The city would argue that it does indeed care about the fate of our signature tiles. City Hall spokesperson John F. Lawson II said via email that the Department of Public Works “requires its contractors to salvage the existing street name tiles and reset them whenever possible,” and “any that are damaged by the contractor during construction, must be replaced at the cost of the contractor.”
If more than 25 percent of a set of tiles is damaged or missing, they must be replaced. Less than 25 percent, and they must be salvaged.
Lawson said that there is a similar federal requirement on FEMA-funded projects, requiring “the existing historic street name tiles to be reset, where technically feasible.”
Custom-made replacement tiles, in both the Belgian and Ohio styles, are produced by the Derby Pottery and Tile company on Magazine Street. Ann Marie Guidry-Derby says the pottery supplies roughly 150 ceramic letters per month to contractors, at $40 each. Since she started keeping track in 2007, Guidry-Derby said, the business has provided 23,000 tiles.
According to Lawson, a $10,000 fine per street name can be leveed against contractors who fail to follow the rules.
Michael Styborski looks around a neighborhood in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
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