The Tiles That Wanted to Raise the Dead

If you walked around Philadelphia in the 1980s and happened to look down at the right crosswalk, you might have noticed something embedded in the asphalt that didn’t belong there: a small rectangle of linoleum, roughly the size of a license plate, fused flush into the street surface as if it had grown there. Up close, it carried a typed message in all capitals, slightly warped by the heat and pressure that had sunk it into the road:

TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’S 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER

Most people walked straight over it without a second glance. The ones who did stop had no way to make sense of what they were reading. It referenced a British historian most Americans had never heard of, a Stanley Kubrick film from 1968, and a plan — stated as flatly as a street sign — to bring the dead back to life on a gas giant with no breathable atmosphere and crushing surface gravity. There was no signature, no date, no explanation. Just the claim, laid into the street as permanently as a manhole cover, and then nothing.

That nothing lasted, in a meaningful sense, for about thirty years. More tiles turned up — not just in Philadelphia but in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, Cleveland, and eventually as far away as Santiago, Chile. Some were small and crude, barely more than a business card’s worth of text. Others, especially from the 1990s onward, sprawled to the size of a welcome mat and grew increasingly unhinged, folding in rants about the Mafia, Ronald Reagan, and a vague persecution narrative alongside the Jupiter message. Whoever was making them was prolific, geographically mobile, and utterly unwilling to explain himself. The tiles simply accumulated, year after year, like a conversation one very committed person was having with a city that hadn’t asked a question.

A phrase that wouldn’t let go

The person who eventually did the most to answer it wasn’t a journalist, a police detective, or an academic. He was a Philadelphia musician named Justin Duerr, who first noticed a tile in 1994 while working as a bike courier downtown and couldn’t stop noticing them afterward. Duerr started keeping a notebook: where he’d seen one, what it said, how it was made. In 1997, with the tiles still appearing and still unexplained, he ran his first internet search for information about them and found almost nothing — a handful of other people, scattered across early message boards, who had independently noticed the same strange rectangles in their own cities and were just as baffled.

That was the shape of the “investigation” for years: isolated strangers in different cities, each quietly collecting sightings, slowly finding each other online, comparing notes on construction technique. The tiles, it turned out, weren’t painted or glued on top of the road — that wouldn’t have survived a single winter of plowing and traffic. They were multi-layered: a base layer of tar paper or asphalt-colored material, a middle layer carrying the typed message under a sheet of clear plastic, sandwiched together and then pressed into the street itself, seemingly by someone who drove slowly over the tile atop a bed of fresh tar, letting traffic do the work of fusing it permanently into the roadway. It explained why they survived so long and told investigators nothing about who had the patience, or the nerve, to lie in a street working a hot epoxy sandwich into traffic lanes without ever once getting caught in the act.

By the mid-2000s, Duerr had connected with two other Philadelphians who shared the obsession — artist and photographer Steve Weinik and researcher Colin Smith — and a filmmaker, Jon Foy, who thought their shared fixation might make a documentary. What started as a side project turned into roughly five years of actual detective work: driving to other cities to photograph tiles before road crews paved over them, cross-referencing variations in phrasing and construction technique to work out which tiles were “authentic” versus copycats, and chasing the one thread that seemed most likely to lead anywhere — the fact that, unlike almost every other tile, a handful of the later, more rambling ones occasionally embedded fragments of a readable name or address inside their sprawling, paranoid text.

It’s worth sitting for a moment with just how little that gave them to work with. There was no central authority tracking tile sightings, no police file to request, no victim to interview, because nobody had technically been victimized — defacing a public street is a minor offense at best, and no city government had ever devoted real investigative resources to figuring out who was behind a phenomenon most officials regarded as a curiosity or, at worst, low-grade vandalism. Everything the group assembled, they assembled themselves: a hand-built, crowdsourced-before-crowdsourcing archive of grainy photographs, hand-copied transcriptions of tile text, and a slowly refined sense of which design details belonged to the “real” tiler and which belonged to the growing number of people making their own tribute versions once word of the mystery spread online. It was, in effect, an amateur forensic linguistics project conducted by people with day jobs, running almost entirely on obsession and spare weekends.

The tile that gave something away

One such clue surfaced far from Philadelphia, on a tile reported in Santiago, Chile — a location that, on its own, had already told the investigators something important: whoever was doing this either had the means to travel internationally and plant tiles personally, or had inspired at least one person abroad to do it for him. That tile, more legible than most of the deteriorating later ones, carried a Philadelphia street address: 2624 South 7th Street.

That single string of characters is what finally gave the amateur investigators a door to knock on. Working backward from the address, they also turned up something that had been sitting in public view the entire time, filed away in a library newspaper archive rather than buried in any tile: a short column from the Philadelphia Inquirer dated March 1983, written by the columnist Clark DeLeon, describing a phone interview with a man who identified himself as a social worker named James Morasco.

Morasco told DeLeon that he’d come across an idea, which he attributed to the historian Arnold Toynbee, about reviving the molecules of the dead and that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had depicted something like it on screen. Morasco’s actual proposal, as he described it, went well beyond quoting a historian: the dead of Earth should be gathered up, frozen, and shipped by space shuttle to Jupiter, where — once the planet’s atmosphere had somehow been transformed — they would be brought back to life en masse. He said he represented a small group called the Minority Association, whose membership he listed for DeLeon with a straight face: “Me, Eric, Eric’s sister who does the typing, Frank…” DeLeon ran the item as a wry, skeptical curiosity, the kind of call a city columnist takes and writes up for a laugh, and then the world moved on. Nobody, including DeLeon, had any reason at the time to connect a crank phone call about Jupiter to tiles that hadn’t started showing up in large numbers yet. It would sit undisturbed in the archive for more than two decades before anyone thought to go looking for it.

The house on 7th Street

Matching the Chile tile’s address to a real property led the investigators to a rowhouse in South Philadelphia and, through neighbors, to a name: Severino “Sevy” Verna, a reclusive man who kept almost entirely to himself. Neighbors described a car belonging to him that had a conspicuously tall antenna mounted on it and, more strikingly, a section of the passenger-side floor that had been cut away — the kind of modification that would let someone driving slowly drop something directly onto the road surface beneath the car without ever having to stop, get out, or be seen crouching in traffic. Other residents recalled odd late-night radio broadcasts years earlier, consistent with a short-wave transmission, carrying a message about resurrecting the dead that sounded unmistakably like the one on the tiles.

It was, circumstantially, about as close to a smoking gun as the investigation ever produced: a name tied to an address found on a tile, a vehicle modified in a way that matched the physical evidence of how tiles were likely placed, and an independent account of the same philosophy being broadcast over the airwaves years before. What it didn’t produce was a confession. When the filmmakers located and approached Verna directly, he denied any involvement in the tiles. He gave them nothing else — no explanation for the car, no comment on the Morasco column, no acknowledgment of the Minority Association. The documentary that resulted, Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, lays out the case the investigators built toward Verna as the likely creator, or at minimum the man behind the “James Morasco” identity used in the 1983 interview — while being honest on screen that the link was never independently confirmed, that Verna himself never admitted it, and that whether Verna and Morasco were strictly the same person, working partners, or something looser was never fully resolved even to the filmmakers’ own satisfaction.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, where director Jon Foy won the festival’s U.S. Documentary Directing Award — a notable honor for a project that had begun as three obsessive Philadelphians trying to answer a question nobody had paid them to ask.

An ending that refuses to arrive

Here is where a tidier story would wrap up: the mystery man found, the confession extracted, the case formally closed. That isn’t what happened, and it’s worth being honest about exactly how far the evidence goes and where it stops. Nothing in the public record proves, with the certainty a court would require, that Severino Verna made any specific tile, that he and James Morasco were the same man, or that one person was responsible for the thousands of tiles found across multiple countries over roughly two decades. What exists is a chain of circumstantial threads — an address, a column, a car, an unconfirmed denial — strong enough that the people who spent years chasing it came away convinced, while stopping short of calling it proven.

The timeline adds its own ambiguity. The classic, earliest style of tile — the compact, typed, plastic-sealed rectangles most associated with the original mystery — had largely stopped appearing by the early 2000s. Multiple accounts place Verna’s death around that same period, though the documentary and the researchers who made it were careful never to frame his death as independently confirmed proof that the original tiler had died; it’s a correlation in timing, not a verified fact tied to a named, dated obituary. What makes the case genuinely unresolved rather than just quietly closed is what happened next: tiles didn’t actually stop. A visibly different, cruder style — rougher lettering, different materials, sometimes just spray paint standing in for the old plastic-and-tar construction — began showing up in Philadelphia and elsewhere not long after the originals tapered off, and that newer style has never stopped completely. As recently as December 2022, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported a Toynbee-style tile discovered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, decades after the first ones were ever noticed, and sightings of similar imitation tiles, including one found outside a film center in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, have kept turning up in the years since. Whether these later tiles are the same person’s continued work, a deliberate homage by someone who watched the documentary, or an entirely separate copycat phenomenon riding on the original’s fame is, itself, unanswered.

So the honest ending is a strange one: a forty-year-old mystery that produced a credible, well-researched, best-guess answer — and still left the central question open. Nobody has ever stood up, on camera or in print, and said, unambiguously, “I did this, and here is why.” The man most plausibly connected to it denied it to the people who found him. The newspaper column that cracked the case open was never written about tiles at all; it was a three-decades-old joke item about a crank phone call, sitting in an archive the whole time, waiting for someone determined enough to go looking for a reason it might matter.

What’s left, driving around certain stretches of Philadelphia today, is the stubborn physical evidence that outlasted every theory about it: a scattering of warped plastic rectangles, worn down by thirty-plus years of tires and snowplows, still legible enough in places to read the same four lines about Toynbee, Kubrick, and a planet nobody has ever actually planned to colonize with anyone, living or dead. The street doesn’t know who put them there. For now, neither does anyone else — not for certain.

Sources

• Toynbee tiles – Wikipedia
• Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles – Wikipedia
• Resurrect Philadelphia: The True Home of the Toynbee Tiles – Hidden City Philadelphia
• The Enduring Urban Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles – Messy Nessy Chic
• Toynbee tiles in Scranton keep Philadelphia art mystery alive – The Philadelphia Inquirer