Sapporo Kita 3-jo Plaza

This guide to Sapporo Kita 3-jo Plaza starts from a technicality: legally, this brick plaza has never stopped being a road. It traces the street's paving history back to 1924, when workers laid one of the city's first paved surfaces here using cut beech-wood blocks instead of asphalt, and follows what happened to those old blocks when the plaza, nicknamed Akapla, was rebuilt ninety years later. Look for the small glass-covered monument at the plaza's edge, where a patch of the original 1924 wood is still on view underfoot.