one of the benefits of wood roads, was that they were easily sanded perfectly smooth, one of the problems with wood block roads, is that they caught on fire. And that famous Chicago fire of 1871? Yeah, was fueled in part by it's wood roads. Two of those roads survived.

In the 1850s wood block streets started to be used in Chicago. The pavement would have been constructed of four by five inch wooden blocks, filled in with gravel and sand and covered with coal tar. All of these combustible material meant that during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 the streets were literally burning

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/wooden-block-alley