When you visit Philadelphia, go to 13th & Chestnut on the South side of the street (the side headed toward Walnut) and face uptown. In the middle of 13th Street, look down and you’ll see a strange tile in the street.
A bit odd, don’t you think? You’re probably wondering what this is and you’d not be the only one.
Several years ago I first came across this odd rubber tile and wondered what it was. From my best guess, the tile appeared to be made from the same material used for marking a pedestrian crossway on asphalt. Now I’ve been a big fan of Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" for a long time, but I didn’t fully comprehend the tile’s message. Who was Toynbee? And what did this have to do with the movie 2001? Needless to say, I was intrigued. I glanced around to see if I could find any further markings to help me ascertain what the tile was, but couldn’t find anything. After a few minutes, I walked on and just decided to file the experience away.
Oddly enough I came across a second tile a few months later at a different intersection in downtown Philadelphia. I still couldn’t figure out what the tiles were for, who had put them there, and what I was supposed to learn from them. The cryptic message appeared to be in code or had been written by a madman. For a long time, the two markings stuck in the back of my mind, nudging me with their outright strangeness. But by the time I discovered my third one, I realized that I needed to do some more research. Some secret message was being burned onto the streets of Philadelphia and I needed to learn who was doing this and why.
I looked up “Toynbee tiles” on Google and found a site that had a listing of all the discovered tiles in Philadelphia.
Now here’s the odd part: As I scrolled down the list of sighted tiles, I realized that they had been discovered not only in other cities throughout the United States, but also in two South American countries. At this point, I had to admit that this was just way too weird and I had to write about it.
Instead of writing a story that dealt directly with the meaning of the tiles, I took a different approach. I had just finished writing “Five Wounds” that is a science fiction story that addresses humanity’s confrontation with aliens who claim to be messengers from God. Not just any God, but Jesus. Miraculously, one alien appears to have the Stigmata. Torn between the beliefs indoctrinated into them from birth and the unexplainable fact that an alien has the Stigmata, the colonists take matters into their own hands in an attempt to erase the blasphemy from their new home.
After writing “Five Wounds,” I wanted to write another story that took place earlier in the timeline and that idea became “Toynbee’s Gate.”
At the beginning of “Toynbee’s Gate,” there’s a scene in which the main character confesses to seeing some of the Toynbee tiles in the ground. I believe my adding the tiles to the plot added some depth to the story. I also believe the odd tiles stick out enough that a reader wonders who created them and why. Little would they know that the tiles are based on some strange events taking place in over a hundred locations throughout North and South America.
I also performed some more research on “Toynbee” and learned that many tile theorists believe that Arnold J. Toynbee, a famous historian, is the man being referenced on the tiles.
While reading up on Arnold J. Toynbee, I came across an entry in Wikipedia that took a stab at correlating some of Toynbee’s beliefs with what the tiles might mean: “In order to survive, humankind must always rush to meet the future, i.e. believe in a better world, and must always aim far beyond what is practically possible, in order to reach something barely within reach. Thus the message might be that humanity ought to strive to colonize Jupiter -- as in Kubrick's work -- or something greater, to survive.”
Definitely, something to think about for a story idea I’d say! But no matter how much research I did, I could not obtain a definite answer as to who created the tiles and why. Although the entry in Wikipedia, gives us the closest answer I think we’ll ever receive to the truth.
I finished writing “Toynbee’s Gate” and went on to other projects, forgetting about tiles. But as fate would have it, I was on a business trip in Washington, D.C. in July of 2003 and on the way to work one morning I nearly stepped on one of the tiles in the middle of the street. I hadn’t seen a tile in some time and had this intense sense of creepiness surround me.
The damn tiles appeared to be following me or popping up when I least expected. I had not been searching them out, but I kept stumbling upon them by accident. I don’t have the exact location of the D.C. tile, but one of my colleagues did snap this picture for me.
Inspiration can be all around you. I try to take advantage of the strange and unusual events that happen around me, using the ideas for stories. You never know when you might encounter such an event, but I’d suggest that you keep an open mind and a pen and paper to write down what you see. And if you’re ever in Philadelphia, visit the Geo Caching link to find some of the tiles. At the very least, you’ll have a chance to see, firsthand, some cryptic, unsolved messages left in the street so you could ponder their meaning.
For further research, I would suggest you visit these sites:
http://www.toynbee.net/
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/3790/
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