This is the next house east from my last entry, also on the south side of Prospect between Clifford and Lathrop, also on the driveway apron. It would be nice to think that perhaps they were doing all the driveways around this time and therefore I could date the eternally undateable William Haskins, but sadly I find it doubtful. The style of the Haskins stamps just doesn’t suggest 1980s to me.
Here’s a nice William Haskins stamp from a driveway apron on the south side of Prospect between Clifford and Lathrop. Sadly, like all Haskins stamps I’ve found, it is undated. I haven’t yet been able to find anything out about this contractor, who has a smattering of stamps around the east side.
I walked on the southern blocks of South Francis Avenue for the first time in a while and discovered, to my surprise, that a fair bit of sidewalk work had been done recently, all of it by White Hawk (who also did a lot of work on South Magnolia recently). Here is a representative example, which happens to be in front of a house I like, on the west side of the street. It would be at the northwest corner of Francis and Harton if Harton hadn’t been vacated at this point.
I like a couple of things about this property. One is the pleasant yard. It doesn’t look like much in the gray late winter, but it has nice shrubs and flowers, lawn ornaments, and a tidy split-rail fence. The other is the house itself, built (surprisingly) in 1942. It’s a small, boxy house, like many on the street, but it has been given just enough little details to lift it above its peers. It has shutters and trim details, and my favorite part, Tudor-like timbers on the sides of the attic level that give it a storybook flair. Its current paint job even has them in a contrasting color. It’s neat.
Here is a faded date with no name, or possibly one that had a name that is no longer visible. It’s at the southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street, on Marcus. I’m interested in it because I have found relatively few 1949 stamps, and because the typeface makes me think of a DPW stamp. I’m trying to narrow down when the DPW because the DPS and right now the earliest DPS stamp I’ve found has been 1950, but there is a possible 1947 one that is difficult to read.
Here’s a new(ish) Eastlund Concrete stamp from the house on the corner of southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street. The house faces Magnolia, but this particular stamp is on Marcus. It looks like in addition to some sidewalk, Eastlund also redid part of the diagonal front walk. I like the way it heads for the corner instead of aiming straight forward to Magnolia. I’ve admired this house for a while because of the interesting multiple cladding on the front facade.
Checking the Belon Real Estate Collection at the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection, I find that the house was built in 1946. A photo of it in 1958 shows it in what I assume was its original paint scheme, with the second floor painted a much darker shade than the first, which adds even more interest to its face; it’s a shame more recent owners have painted it all the same color. Still, it is an attractive house marred by deferred maintenance, unsurprising since it is landlord-owned.
Someone with a subscription to Newspapers.com (which I don’t have) has helpfully clipped a legal notice compelling sidewalk construction from the May 15, 1961, [Lansing] State Journal. The city was having sidewalk built on a lot of streets near Cavanaugh Park in the old Everett neighborhood. I see a lot of parcels on Lowcroft Street, Ora Street, and Southgate Avenue, among others. Also, note the dubious factoid about weasels run as a space-filler above the legal notices.
As I’m not familiar with the south side at all, I was surprised to see a Livernois Street listed. Livernois is a major street in Detroit, but I didn’t know there was one in Lansing. I went to check it out in the Google street view and discovered that it is such an inconsequential street that Google has not taken photos of it. It’s a narrow, dirt road, a block long, that runs alongside Cavanaugh Park; according to Lansing’s property records, there are no addresses on it. Curiously, there are two lots on Livernois listed in the 1961 sidewalk construction notice, yet the street view (its short length can be seen from Cavanaugh) shows that there is no sidewalk on it now.
Oh goody, one for my diagonal stamp collection. (I like corner markings, for some reason.) It’s quite faint and in fact I walk past here quite often and had not noticed it before. I think the wet pavement and the lighting brought it out this time. The date appears to be 1947 and the name is certainly either Lansing DPS or DPW. The DPS stamps and the 1920s-40s DPW stamps are similar in appearance.
What strikes me as interesting here is that it does look to me like it is DPS, and I had previously not found a DPS stamp from before 1950. I am not sure why or when the DPW changed to the DPS, but it changed to DPS sometime prior to 1950 (or, depending on this stamp, 1947), and then back again sometime between 1953 and 1977, and then started stamping O & M (Operations and Maintenance, part of the Division of Public Service) sometime between 1992 and 2005.
This stamp is outside Papa John’s Pizza on East Michigan Avenue, near the southwest corner of Michigan and Allen.
I managed to find a contractor stamp I hadn’t done yet! I actually cost myself a bit of time on a virtual 5K I was doing to get the photo. This is from the south side of East Michigan Avenue just west of the railroad tracks near Hill Street. It’s outside the Block600 mixed-use development that includes Meijer’s Capital City Market and the Courtyard by Marriott and probably came about as a result of that construction.
Cascade Cement Contracting is, as the stamp says, based in Caledonia, which is a suburb of Grand Rapids. According to their Web site, they were founded in 1972 by a pair of brothers who had emigrated from the Netherlands in the 1960s.
What’s this metal disc in front of the Stadium District building, on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Cedar and Larch? Could it be one of the holes drilled so businesses could display flags, as mentioned in a 1949 [Lansing] State Journal?
I find it doubtful, since this entire block was redeveloped in the 2000s, but since there are no dates on any of the sidewalks here, it’s impossible to say for sure how old they are. It does look like there is a hole here and that the metal plate is designed to be removable for some purpose (otherwise they would have just slapped some filler over the hole). There are a row of them up and down the block. They are too awkwardly placed to imagine them being used for flagpoles again, if that’s what they were originally for; this one, for instance, is in front of a window.
Here’s another interesting item I found while scrounging around in old [Lansing] State Journals, this one from January 26, 1947. It’s a front page, leftmost column titled “By the Way.” (The main headlines that day were “Liquor Board Shakeup Seen” and, just under it, “‘Scarface’ Al Capone Dead,” and much as it is tempting to put the two together, they are unrelated events.)
Here is the column in its entirety:
Lansing city officials and aldermen who nave had long experience in municipal government affairs have about come to the conclusion that citizens are willing to pay more taxes if they receive a fair return in services they demand. The old logic of municipal authorities, which largely holds true today, is that the budget should be pared to the bone, so to speak, to keep taxes down and the taxpayers happy. However, with fast changing times this thought is rapidly giving way to a reversal of the old logic. Officials are finding that citizens demand only the best with cost a secondary matter. Prime example of the new thought trend is a demand for quick service by the public works department in clearing the streets of snow and caring for icy streets In winter months. The average citizen wants his street and sidewalk plowed out within a couple of hours after a snowfall. With present equipment this job takes from 24 to 36 or more hours. It is a physical impossibility to complete the work in less time. Budget-minded officials, seeking to save the taxpayer added costs, takes a “beating” in complaints from citizens. These questions therefore present themselves to the aldermen and department heads: Should several thousand dollars more be Invested in additional snow removal equipment which is used relatively few times during the year in this work? Would the taxpayer be willing to pay a little more to get this “deluxe super-service?” Officials think the citizens would pay more, but harbor the fear of scathing criticism which comes after Mr. Citizen gets his new tax bill. Such services cannot be added or enlarged without additional expense. Aldermen know this and hesitate to take any action until they know just “how much” each project will cost. Additional employes, maintenance and numerous other items must be considered, because these must be paid through future years. Small pressure groups have little success in “bulling” their pet projects through the city council, but city-wide sentiment favoring some particular service or project is sure to receive serious attention and most likely, favorable action by the aldermen.
I didn’t realize I was reading the news organ of Bizarro Lansing. “Citizens demand only the best with cost a secondary matter,” you say? That must be nice. More to the point of this blog, though, is this: “The average citizen wants his street and sidewalk plowed out within a couple of hours after a snowfall.” That evidently means that the city used to clear sidewalks instead of having a useless and nearly unenforced ordinance requiring residents to do it themselves (eventually). I now really want to know when that changed.