This one strikes painfully close to home! I grew up on an old colonial street in a major Latin American city. Beautiful street "paved" with cobblestones. Someh

This one strikes painfully close to home! I grew up on an old colonial street in a major Latin American city. Beautiful street "paved" with cobblestones. Somehow the cobblestones managed to look both randomly placed and have some "lines" that gave it a very orderly look. The cobblestones were placed in some substrate that allowed moss to grow between them. At some point about 10 years ago, the city decided to tear up a giant trench in the middle of the street to replace some sewage. When they were done, they covered the trench with concrete and then re-placed the stones they had removed onto the concrete. It looks nothing like it used to. Just messy. I think that if someone who didn't grow up there were to see it, they would think it was a perfectly charming street, but really it lost so, so much. I asked around and apparently nobody knows how to lay cobblestones anymore. There was a certain art to how they were placed and the substrate selected: dirt, then sand (what kind? how coarse?) then stones, then something else. This ensured that they would never wash away even in the torrential rains we get here every year. Placing cobblestones seems like an easy thing to do. Just rocks on dirt, right? But how do you ensure they never move, they never wash away, they don't get covered in dirt or greenery. The craziest thing is that the street had remained basically pristine for what was probably 100+ years, but the new stones on concrete are already falling out.