Illustration by Britt Spencer
When I was a young man, the world was full of mystery. Back then, we didn’t know whether women blushed in the dark, a question that flummoxed both Charles Darwin and every nervous lad who ever dared to unhook a bra strap. Recently, researchers armed with heat-sensitive cameras proved that people’s cheeks do turn red with the lights off, and the world became less magical. But even in this Information Age, when science has settled most questions and Google has all the answers, the Toynbee Tiles remain a mystery.
The colorful linoleum plaques are embedded in the asphalt of urban intersections across the Western Hemisphere. They began popping up in Philadelphia in the mid-’80s; others can be found in such places as Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis. There were once several tiles downtown, but thanks to thieves and road crews, only one original remains here, situated in a crosswalk near City Garden. Of the hundreds of tiles found across the country, nearly all bear the same four-line message: “Toynbee Idea / In Kubrick’s 2001 / Resurrect Dead / On Planet Jupiter.”
Colin Smith, one of four tile-obsessed Philadelphians who made the award-winning documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, argues that this references a plan to bring dead people back to life on Jupiter, using information gleaned from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the writings of philosopher Arnold Toynbee, whose book Experiences deals with the concept of resurrection.
How could the tiles be pounded into the street, seemingly overnight, without the use of construction equipment? Luckily, in one of the tiles, the author included instructions for making more: First, carve your message into a piece of soft linoleum. Next, coat it with glue and asphalt crack filler, then cover it with black tar paper. Placed in a busy intersection, this disguised tile will blend in with the blacktop. By the time the tar paper has worn off the top, traffic will have driven the plaque into the pavement.
That still leaves the biggest mystery unsolved: Who is the Toynbee tiler? In the film, Smith and his fellow researchers zero in on three candidates. A tile in South America lists an address in South Philadelphia, making suspects of both former resident and railroad worker Julius Piroli and reclusive current resident Sevy Verna. They are joined by someone named James Morasco, who appeared in a Philadelphia Inquirer article about a group called the Minority Association with plans to resurrect the dead on Jupiter.
After years spent gathering evidence, the filmmakers have “satisfied themselves” that they know the tiler’s true identity. But this Sage believes some mysteries are more fun when left unsolved.
