glass_tiles

Glass tiles tour talk:

You may have noticed some of these glass filled panels in the downtown. There are about 40 of these panels left in the sidewalks. When they built the city after the fire with concrete they needed some light under the sidewalks that lead into the basements of the buildings.

The idea behind the use of the glass was from early sailing ships that had glass like this in their decks so said could see below deck.

The glass in these early panels were clear. However because of the chemicals in the glass and their reaction to sunlight, they have turned to pink or purple.

A lot of these big panels have been in completely replaced. However, right now instead of removing the glass panels or filling each glass tile in, there’s a project to replace the glass one at a time with a new glass.

One of the good examples of these panel is at the Elliott Hotel on 12th street.
At night they are lit from underneath.