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It all started right here in South Philly, it seems, on the 2600 block of South Seventh Street. At least that’s what three devoted researchers discovered after years of hunting for a mysterious tiler responsible for the Toynbee tiles of 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. In Movie 2011. Resurrect Dead. On Planet Jupiter.”
There are hundreds and they’re not just in Philadelphia. They’ve been dropped into streets with a markedly innovative technique from Boston to Kansas City and Detroit to Buenos Aires. 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. Toynbee’s (the “Toynbee idea” reference) “Experiences,” published at the end of the ’60s by Oxford University Press.
The tiles themselves are about the size of a license plate and carved out of linoleum. As Colin Smith described them Monday, they’re like a sandwich.
“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. “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.
And 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. 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.”
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 [streets] 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. It was in 1995 and ’96 that he started going to the public library to use the Internet.
“Toynbee idea was the first thing I ever typed into a search engine,” Duerr says to the camera.
Images flash across the screen in this scene as he starts to find listings for the tiles: Ninth and Shunk [streets], 11th [Street] and Oregon [Avenue], Broad [Street] and Oregon [Avenue]. He started photographing and documenting tiles with his girlfriend and found them in Times Square and at the foot of the Holland Tunnel. The tiles themselves still didn’t really make any sense to him, but it was his burning curiosity and drive to understand them that brought him in front of the camera for a Sundance-award winning documentary (for Best Direction: Documentary) and to Steve Weinik and Smith, who as a team, would come just shy of catching the mysterious tiler. Until they realized that maybe they should stop trying to find him. And that maybe he didn’t want to be found.
Like Duerr sets forth in the film, the four elements of a standard Toynbee tile make sense alone but not together. You’ve got Toynbee the historian, the Stanley Kubrick film and then there’s Jupiter and resurrection. Well, Toynbee believed that perhaps science would deliver the mythology of Heaven that religion never would or could. Yes, Toynbee, and it seems the mysterious tiler, believed in building a Heaven on Jupiter by simply reconnecting and rebuilding the molecules that make up the human body, in space. Was it because he feared death? Was it because he had a “proto-religious” experience watching Kubrick’s seminal space film? We still don’t know.
The three researchers were bound to determine the tiler’s identity and home base by a few big clues: a South Philly rowhouse address from a tile dropped in Chile (the Seventh Street address), a mysterious mention in a Philadelphia Inquirer column from ’83 by Clark DeLeon, and a one-act play by David Mamet called “4 A.M.” that was published in ’85.
It was the rowhouse clue that would yield the most vibrant clues. They went to his block (all of the suspects were male) and found test tiles everywhere. Neighbors talked of a reclusive neighbor who pad-locked his front door, took in injured birds and drove a car with a missing floorboard on the passenger side and, at one point, a huge shortwave radio transmitting antennae. He drove around South Philly with the message “Resurrect Dead” disturbing television broadcasts such as the evening news. As Steve Weinik put it, “He was tiling the airwaves, he was tiling the 11 o’clock news.”
There are endless odd paths to chase down, like the paranoid rants of a manifesto that once sat at 16th and Chestnut streets. They are too many and twisted to print here. But some of the sub-texts that accompanied the standard tiles are totally wild: “Under Freedom of Information Act, NBC Journalists Funneled FBI Information On Me To Soviet…”, “I’m Only One Man And When I Caught A Fatal Disease They Gloated Over Its Death,” and, frighteningly, “Murder Every Journalist. I Beg You.”
With an alias, James Morasco, the tiler started something called The Minority Association that sought to publicize the message of Toynbee and the tiles. As Duerr says: “He became fixated on this idea that he had found this answer to overcome death and if he just found a way to publicize the idea that the rest of the story would write itself, but everyone just mocked him.”
After he lost faith in the media, he started experimenting with tiles and, according to the experts, is alive and in the area, even still putting down fresh tiles.
We chose not to use his name for this story with the slight hope that he would read the South Philly Rreview and that his privacy deserved to be respected. But the question remains – what does it all mean and is he absolutely that far off?
Duerr believes he shared a bus with the tiler, he’s almost certain, but when they deboarded and exchanged nervous glances, he walked away, thinking “You can’t force someone to open up to you.”
Contact Staff Writer Bill Chenevert at bchenevert@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.
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