Freedmen's Town Bricks

The brick paving on Andrews and Wilson streets in Freedmen's Town, Houston's Fourth Ward, was laid by the neighborhood's own Black residents in the early twentieth century, after the City of Houston declined to pave the streets of the settlement freed people had founded in 1865. Accounts differ on the details. The American Planning Association dates the work to 1917–1922 and says residents bought and placed the bricks themselves; oral tradition credits members of the Rev. Jeremiah Smith's congregation with the first bricks on Andrews Street; and residents recalled paying a dollar a brick for the paving in front of their homes. Some intersections carry patterns that local historians connect to West African and Yoruba traditions.

A 2007 agreement between Mayor Bill White and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee would have run new water and sewer lines under the sidewalks and left the streets alone. In June 2014 City Council instead approved a $5 million plan to lift the bricks, replace the pipes and relay about a third of them, regrouped at intersections. In January 2015 the Freedmen's Town Preservation Coalition won a temporary restraining order halting the removal. In late 2016 a drainage contractor disturbed about 200 bricks at Andrews and Genesee streets without authorization; Mayor Sylvester Turner stopped the work, and the bricks were reinstalled in 2018.

In 2022 the Houston Freedmen's Town Conservancy, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Houston Public Works began Rebirth in Action, a joint plan for both streets. Contractors disturbed bricks again in 2025 and early 2026, and in March 2026 City Council voted to move 86 pallets of stored bricks into a covered structure on Wilson Street in the Conservancy's care. In October 2026 more than 20,000 bricks were returned to the neighborhood, with city officials agreeing to reinstall them in their original places.