There are plenty of 1944 DPW stamps on Horton Street, but this one, on the east side of the street between Michigan and Jerome, is unusually placed. It’s on the sidewalk across the house’s driveway, and it faces sideways, toward the house, as though it were showing off to the homeowner.
This is in front of the same house as the nearly-gone hall of shame sidewalk from the last entry.
I failed trying to collect the interesting unknown stamp on Hickory Street again. It was too dark by the time I managed to get there after work, and the nearest street light was out. I had to settle for this BBRPCI stamp next door. This is on the south side of Hickory between Euclid and Pennsylvania. It’s also quite close to the J.F. Sowa home that I wrote about previously.
While I was scouting, I heard a tremendous rumbling, which was a train coming on the nearby tracks, on the other side of Euclid. I walked to the end of the street to watch it. It was quite loud as it passed, reminding me of my parents’ old house (which I lived in during school breaks from college). It was close to the railroad tracks in Chelsea, and a train would go by every night. At first it woke me all the time, but eventually it didn’t anymore.
I had hopes of getting out to a stamp on my “to do” list for today’s entry. It’s one I spotted on a walk quite a while ago, on Hickory Street. It looked old and possibly novel, but it was too muddy to read. I thought if I got lucky someone might have shoveled the sidewalk, leaving a bit of snow in the stamp, because sometimes that makes the old ones more legible. Unfortunately, my plans came to nought due to having a very poor night’s sleep that meant I had to nap this afternoon and left me walking after dark again. So instead, I’ll just have to give you a bit of sidewalk news I ran across recently.
A segment of I-496 (the Olds Freeway) between Lansing Road and the Grand River will be undergoing a big reconstruction project that will start in April and run through the rest of 2022 and into 2023. 496 will be completely closed from June to November of this year. The reason I took notice of this for the sidewalk blog is this statement in an article from WLNS.com: “The project aims to widen I-496, resurface sidewalks, and upgrade ramps along the I-496 service drives between M-99 and Grand River.” (This is a somewhat confusing statement as it suggests Grand River Avenue, but 496 doesn’t touch Grand River. They meant the Grand River, as in the body of water.) By “the I-496 service drives” I have to assume they mean (at least in part) Malcolm X Street. Two important points for sidewalk fans. First, those new sidewalks had better be stamped, although the city’s recent track record with enforcing the sidewalk marking code has been very poor. Second, I had better get out there before April and start taking some sidewalk photos.
The weather recently hasn’t been very conducive to hunting sidewalk stamps, so all I can do is show you something pretty. This O & M (city Operations & Maintenance) stamp is one you’ve seen before. In fact, it’s the first stamp ever featured in this blog. But this time it’s got a light dusting of snow in it, left behind after the sidewalk was cleared, and I just love how that looks.
It’s on the east side of Regent Street’s 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.
This utility cover is set into the east side of North Clemens Avenue between Michigan and Jerome, near the entrance to the parking lot that runs behind the Green Door bar and other businesses on that block. There is a hole through the company name, but it is the Neenah Foundry Co. of Neenah, Wisconsin.
Neenah Foundry is still in business, though these days they are part of a larger company known as NEI (Neenah Enterprises, Inc.). I’m disappointed that their Web site doesn’t have a company history on it, which is always what I hope for. It does say that they have “almost 150 years of experience” and that their “most recognizable products include manhole covers and frames, inlet frames and grates, tree grates, and cast-iron trench grates in roads and airport runways across America and internationally.”
This stamp, from the south side of Marcus Street between Clemens and Fairview, is a typical example of a Cantu & Sons stamp with the 1987 date corrected to 1988. There are a lot of ones like that around the neighborhood. The real reason I photographed it, though, was the odd graffiti, added as though an addendum to the contractor stamp: “The Butterfly.”
There is something else scrawled in the corner to the left, but I wasn’t able to make it out in the current light.
No sidewalk for you today; in fact there is no sidewalk at all on this block, Mifflin Avenue between Kalamazoo and Marcus. Instead, here is a little relic that always makes me a bit sad: the stairs to a long-gone house. (I’m not sure how long gone, but it was already gone by the earliest Google street views in 2007.)
There is only one house remaining on this (west) side of the block, and that one is so obscured by tree cover that it is hard to see. There are a few more houses on the other side, but like much of the Urbandale neighborhood, this is a sparsely-occupied block, and one that is likely to continue depopulating.
I couldn’t find anything really new for you tonight, so here’s a T.A. Forsberg stamp from the east side of South Fairview Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.
On Sunday I decided to walk around the Flowerpot neighborhood in East Lansing after dark, out of the belief that there might be a lot of Christmas displays still up there. This turned out to be a mistake on several counts: the neighborhood has few streetlights, so it was unsettlingly dark; only part of the neighborhood has sidewalks, and they were as perilously icy as the roads; and there were only a scant few Christmas displays. It was a pretty miserable walk, one that took nearly an hour despite covering only about a mile and a half of ground, and near the end of it I realized I had dropped my lens cap and couldn’t be bothered to retrace to look for it.
Still, I did have one success: I found an interesting sidewalk stamp that was near enough one of the few streetlights to register in a photograph. It’s a T L Contracting stamp, and while I’ve found one before, it was a lot plainer than this one. This one is on the north side of Marigold Avenue between Hicks and Larkspur.
This new T L stamp uses the modular style – I think of it as the “hamburger” – that a lot of more recent stamps share, including the more recent O & M stamps. It adds something I have never seen in another contractor stamp, the contractor’s phone number. It makes sense for them to use a stamp as advertising in this way, and I’m just surprised I’ve never seen it before. The phone number is a little hard to make out in this light but it is (517) 669-0600, which I can link with the T L Contracting (or as they actually style it, TL Contracting) located on Industrial Parkway in Lansing. They don’t have a Web site I can find, but they do have a Facebook page.
The last line seems to be “Lansing, MI” and a hard-to-read zip code, probably 48906, since that’s what their zip is. 48906. I find it odd to include the zip when they don’t have the rest of the address and I wonder if they thought “Lansing, MI” on its own just didn’t take up enough space on the line.
I must have passed this disc, in the sidewalk on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Regent and Clemens, hundreds of times, and yet I’d never noticed it before. For some reason I stopped to look at it this time, thinking it was a groundwater well cover. To my surprise, it is something cooler (at least if you have my temperament): a survey monument, specifically a benchmark.
I don’t know much about survey monuments, but this one seems plainer and less informative than ones I have stumbled on elsewhere. I wonder what is hidden beneath the lid? It appears to be open up if a screw is removed. I also don’t know what the code on the rim means.
