If you’ve walked through Mount Pleasant, you’ve probably seen and read many of these history plaques set around the neighbourhood.

It’s interesting how short the corporate memory can be. A while back the City’s engineering department was busy digging up Alberta Street and lifted the bricks, carefully stacked them on pallets and carted them away. When the work was done the road was paved with asphalt, who knows where the bricks went.

Sitting on the south west corner of 10th and Alberta is this plaque telling you all about the brick street that’s now not there…

Here’s the text: “This Section of Alberta Street was bricked in about 1910 and is one of the last surviving brick streets in the city. on hilly streets such as this, horses could get their hooves between the bricks for a better grip. the advent of the automobile in the 1910s accelerated the use of asphalt for paving city streets. before 1910, most streets in the city were dirt roads as shown in the photograph above. Main streets were paved with granite blocks, wood blocks, wood planks or bricks.

The first curbs in the city were cut from granite and some can still be seen in the neighbourhood. the stone used to mount this plaque is actually one of these original curb sections from Mount Pleasant”.