“You coulda hit me in the head with a St. Joe brick!”

St. Joe Brick Works, located on the Pearl River in Louisiana, has produced (in the company’s words) “good, honest bricks” for buildings and sidewalks since 1891, using an antiquated colonial method. An Irish immigrant nicknamed St. Joe founded the eponymous brickmaking company.

The beloved brick gave rise to a local expression indicating surprise. Example: “When I scored that Zulu coconut, you coulda hit me in the head with a St. Joe brick!”

Over the decades, some old brick sidewalks in New Orleans have been buried by soil, covered in concrete, or broken up by the muscular roots of live oak trees.

More of these historic sidewalks are being unburied, or else replaced by new bricks from the still-functioning St. Joe factory.

A yellow “Mardi Gras bead dog” guards a brick sidewalk in the Leonidas neighborhood . . .

Uptown straight and narrow . . .

Sun-dappled bricks, mottled bark of stewartia trees

No idea why someone covered this sidewalk in fabric, but I was drawn to the bricks’ texture outlined by wet cloth after a rain.

All photos by Camille Martin