It’s final grading week and I spent last night up until the early hours grading exams and I’ll probably be doing it again tonight, so here’s a late and low-key update. This is from a driveway apron on the east side of Regent Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. I’ve been able to see the date for a while, but recently the name has also suddenly become more visible. It’s hard to see in this photo, but the last several letters are SSETT indicating it is, unfortunately, just a regular old C. Gossett stamp, similar to very many others on this block.
I’ve never been able to learn anything in my research about C. Gossett or find a single reference to them, despite how many sidewalks they laid in around here in the 1960s.
It’s somewhat unusual to find a dated O & M (city Operations and Maintenance) stamp in any case, but especially rare in the southern reaches of the Urbandale neigborhood. This one is near the dead end (south of Horton, north of I-496) on the west side of the street.
Sorry for the poor photo. I’m still not used to my new phone. It’s delightfully tiny but a bit hard to handle for photographs.
I know you’re thinking that I’m a little early for a change, but actually, I’m a lot late. Sorry about that. It’s finals week, also known as crunch time for professors. Anyway, here’s a couple of stamps from the entrance to an alleyway that runs from Marcus to Elizabeth Street, between Clemens and Fairview.
This one is from the approach to the alleyway. I had to scrape dirt away from it with my foot.
The entrance to the alleyway and the sidewalk that it crosses were evidently done at the same time.
This stamp is from the sidewalk part. The dirt is currently doing a very nice job of making the letters pop.
There are a few little churches which, while obviously not formally affiliated with CMU, are tucked surprisingly tightly into campus near the building where I work. They are all small, low-slung, modern-looking buildings. It was outside one of them, Christ the King Lutheran Chapel, that I found this sidewalk graffiti.
I think it reads “G.H. + P.K. Nov. 9 1964” although I am not confident about the second set of initials. The year makes sense as likely being when the sidewalk was first constructed. According to Christ the King’s “About Us” page, the chapel was dedicated in 1966.
I found a pair of diagonal Lansing DPW stamps on either corner of a driveway apron, facing the street, on the east side of Clifford Street between Elizabeth and Fuller. Given how often I walk around this block and my particular interest in collecting diagonal stamps, I’m a little surprised I haven’t noticed them before. They are very faint – one of them was too faint to show up in a photograph.
Here’s a mysterious date marking from the east side of Clifford Street between Kalamazoo and Marcus. The typeface and corner placement strongly suggest it was done by the BWL, but they usually stamped their name into the lower left corner of the same slab, so I’m not sure why it is absent here. Possibly the sidewalk used to be wider.
Sorry for the blurry photo; I’m still getting used to my new phone.
Sorry for the unplanned absence; I spend Easter with family and that got me behind in a way that spilled into the week. Speaking of Easter, on the Saturday before, I walked in the Hippity Hop 5K held at Potter Park Zoo. The course is usually on the River Trail, but much of the Trail was flooded this year so they had to figure out an alternate route. They ended up having us walk out of Potter Park on the entrance drive and then head into the nearby Sycamore Park neighborhood. Although I was walking in the street along with everyone else, I couldn’t help noticing a lot of new-looking sidewalk, with stamps, scattered around the neighborhood. Eventually I decided I had to know whether it was a contractor I’ve seen before, so I jumped out of the flow of race traffic onto the sidewalk to see and was rewarded with a contractor name I didn’t recognize. I stopped to take photos at the cost of probably 30 seconds of finishing time
The only Cioffi Construction I can find is based in Akron, and I can’t imagine that one would be doing work in metro Lansing. The stamp uses a template that’s very familiar to me as many contractors in the 2010s and 20s have used it, along with the City of Lansing Operations and Maintenance division. This particular stamp is at the north corner of Clifton and Harding, but there are a lot of other Cioffi stamps in the vicinity that I assume are all connected with the same round of sidewalk replacement.
Other racers round the corner as I take the photo.
Easter might be the best holiday for sidewalk aficionados. Christmas makes for the prettiest walks, but there’s the complication of the sidewalks too often being under snow or worse, covered in hazardous ice. Easter, though, more or less marks the end of serious snow here in Michigan, and the start of good city walking weather. Now I’m back to just the usual uneven sidewalks to cause falls.
All this is to say I am taking a short break from sidewalk blogging and will be back as usual on Monday. Happy Easter and happy spring!
I found this neat, unobtrusive graffiti on the south side of Vine Street between Ferguson and Custer. It’s alongside a house that faces Custer. I initially speculated that it was two sets of initials from two people in the same family, with a last name starting with M.
Checking the property records online, however, I found that in 2009 the house was sold by someone with the last name Lum. So either someone in the house was named K.L.M. Lum, or KLM were the leading initials of three members of the house (perhaps the children). The owner’s name I see in the records did not start with K, L, or M.
