Back in the Capital City now, on the west side of Horton Avenue between Jerome and the dead end, I found this worn, old Department of Public Works stamp. I’ve actually passed it many times before, but the waning light (oh, that early sunset, this time of year!) was raking everything at such a perfect angle that I thought I might be able to make out the illegible date this time.
Now that I have seen it in good light, I think the date marking there is actually a month, May, similar to this stamp nearby which is also labeled “May” with no apparent year. Strange.
It was a beautiful evening for looking at sidewalk markings, anyway. Look at this light.
This is another sidewalk-adjacent and Lansing-non-adjacent entry. There is a one-room schoolhouse, the Bohannon School, on the southwest corner of West Campus Drive and West Preston Street, close to the building where I work at Central Michigan University. I’ve seen it many times but never walked up to it, so on a recent walk I did. I was immediately charmed by the brick front walk, particularly the old-looking embossing on the bricks.
The front walk on the Preston side of the school.
The schoolhouse was built in 1901 but only moved here for restoration in 1970, so I’m not sure why the bricks look quite so old, unless they moved the bricks with it. A quick search lets me know that Metropolitan bricks are a favorite of brick enthusiasts. Here is an entry about them from a blog called Brickfrog (tagline: “All brick, all the time”). Sidewalk fan blog: meet brick fan blog. While this is my first foray into pictures of bricks, Brickfrog already has a few entries about sidewalk markers. Brickfrog’s sidewalk markers are from the Boston area, and are of a kind unknown in Lansing: metal plaques actually set into the concrete. I have seen pictures of these in a few big cities, but have never seen one myself.
A lot of the bricks have been swallowed by the grass over the years.
The Metropolitan Block Co. dates back to 1866 and produced a lot of the country’s street paving bricks starting in the 1890s. They were, and still are, in Canton, Ohio. They currently call themselves Metrobrick. Amusingly, they manufacture at least two different varieties of bricks that are pre-distressed in order to make them look old, an attempt to avoid the problem that brand-new bricks always look too perfect and thus fake.
This is nearby the sidewalk stamp featured in the previous blog entry, and was taken on the same walk near my work in Mount Pleasant. It’s on the west side of Watson Road between Preston and Crescent. It got my attention especially because my grandfather had a long and distinguished career with Michigan Consolidated Gas Company in Ann Arbor and Detroit.
As with the Bell System cover, this one bears a name no longer in use. MichCon, as it was commonly known, merged with DTE Energy (or as I knew it when I was young, Detroit Edison) in 2001, and in 2013 its name changed to DTE Gas.
Based on warning markings on it, the pipe seems to be a vent of some kind for the gas utility.
With apologies to those who are here only for Lansing sidewalks, I have been dabbling in some Mount Pleasant sidewalk exploration because I have started taking my daily walks up at work some days. It’s been slim pickings, with very few stamps that I have found near work, mostly Eastlund Concrete. I was pleased to finally run across one for a contractor I haven’t seen before, Lakeshore Construction. The stamp is on the west side of Watson Road between Preston Street and Crescent Drive.
The stamp is a familiar style, a modular format seen in a lot of stamps from the last decade or so. I can tell that Lakeshore Construction is a contractor after my own heart. How do I know? Because their web site’s main image is a closeup of their stamp! The site describes them thusly:
Lakeshore Construction is a full service construction and concrete company specializing in stamped concrete, decorative walkways and patios, driveways, poured concrete walls and foundations. Lakeshore Construction started in 2016 servicing the Mid-Michigan area.
This manhole cover is in the sidewalk (if you can call that asphalt mess a sidewalk) that accompanies North Aurelius Road as it climbs over the railroad tracks. It’s on the west side of the street, roughly between Walsh and Perkins.
All over Michigan, when you see a manhole cover or a sewer grate, the odds are good that it will display the name of the East Jordan Iron Works. They were founded in 1883 as the Round and Malpass Foundry and made cast iron parts for the lumber industry, ships, machinery, agricultural equipment, and railroads. East Jordan is in the northwest of Michigan, so the connection with the lumber industry is unsurprising. In 1885 their name changed to the East Jordan Iron Works. Since 2012, they call themselves just plain “EJ,” which I find a little disappointing. Their corporate headquarters are still in East Jordan, but they are now a multinational company, having acquired a lot of other foundries over the years. In 2017 they built a new foundry after almost 135 years in their original location, which is amazing. Happily for the town, I’m sure, they built the new one just 14 miles away from the original.
EJ has a detailed company history and timeline on its Web site. I wish all companies did this.
The Potter-Walsh neighborhood can be seen to the west of the Aurelius overpass.
No stamp here, just an oddity. The sidewalk at the southwest corner of Leslie and Malcolm X Streets splits. What is presumably the original sidewalk heads inconveniently away from the intersection, so a new strip (asphalt, not proper sidewalk) has been added that better follows the curve of Malcolm X.
I assume that the concrete sidewalk follows the original alignment of Malcolm X, when it was Main Street, and before it got moved around during the construction of I-496. The house directly across Leslie, which the concrete sidewalk seems to aim at, was only built in 2005.
This isn’t the only oddity in the vicinity. The nearby houses violate my sense of orderliness, as they don’t follow Lansing’s code for house numbering (which is usually very well observed). For some reason, house numbers to the south jump abruptly from 910 to 948. Blocks usually top out at 37.
Yesterday I made a largely failed attempt to scout a new neighborhood for interesting stamps. I decided to go to the Flowerpot neighborhood, which I had heard of but never been to before, to the best of my recollection. It is a cluster of streets mostly named for flowers (hence the name) located at the western edge of East Lansing south of Kalamazoo. This little pocket of land is an area of town that has always been vague and fuzzy in my mental map of Lansing. I tend to think of Kalamazoo as leaving the east edge of Lansing, going through a sad little slice of Lansing Township near the freeway overpass, and then just cutting through a short, indistinct area of nothing before getting to MSU. The Flowerpot neighborhood is hidden away in that “short, indistinct area” which isn’t quite as “nothing” as my mental map makes it out to be.
I thought it would be interesting to see the neighborhood and perhaps find stamps that are contemporary to the development of the streets, but my trip wasn’t so lucky. First of all, nearly all the streets are marked as no parking at any time on both sides, so a quick stop on my way home from work turned into a parking hassle. Second, I quickly discovered that most of the streets have no sidewalks (and no curbs either, giving it a rural look). Only the two longest ones, Marigold and Narcissus, have sidewalks. Third, on a short walk as dusk started to settle in, I wasn’t able to find any interesting stamps. Most were Able or L & L stamps from the 90s and 2000s. I finally had to give up and shoot this BBRPCI stamp on the west side of Narcissus Drive, between Lilac Avenue and Daisy Lane, before I ran out of light.
Still, it was interesting to see the neighborhood, and it struck me that it seems like it is probably a great place to trick-or-treat. ELi (East Lansing Info, the East Lansing digital newspaper) has an interesting article on the history of the Flowerpot neighborhood. The article explained something that puzzled me on my visit, which is why all the streets were named for flowers except the theme-breaking “Hicks Drive.” It was originally the Hicks farm until the Hicks family began selling lots from it in the 1920s.
I happened to walk past and catch sight of workers smoothing out some brand new concrete in front of the Allen Place project, continuing my observations on the progress of Allen Place’s sidewalk. I didn’t see any sign of stamping yet, sorry to say. I’m afraid this is almost certainly going to end up a Hall of Shame candidate.
I live in Lansing but work in Mount Pleasant. I’ve digressed from metro Lansing before to post some stamps from Albion, where my parents live, but haven’t done any from Mount Pleasant. So, while taking my lunch break walk today, I decided to see what I could find.
The southern stamp.
I walked probably a mile along South Washington Street before I finally found any stamps at all. I am going to assume Mount Pleasant has no ordinance requiring sidewalk stamping. I did eventually find a pair of stamps bookending a long stretch on the east side of Washington between Gaylord and May. Eastlund Concrete gets around: they are also one of the only stamps I have been able to find near my parents’ house in Albion, as well as showing up frequently in Lansing. They’re based in Holt, south of Lansing, making Mt. Pleasant a pretty good hike for them. They evidently are also pretty consistent stampers, since it appears that stamping sidewalks is uncommon in both Albion and Mount Pleasant.
I had to stop the car and take a look at this tiny little stub of a street in the Groesbeck neighborhood because I was amazed to see that it not only had a name, it had a sidewalk, on the west side of the block. I found the only stamp on it. The name is mostly illegible, but from experience I can recognize it as an Audia Concrete stamp.
I found myself wondering why the grandiosely-named Somercroft Drive existed. It seems to exist just to serve one of the entrance drives to the adjacent Post Oak elementary school, but it seems like it could have just been a driveway, rather than a named street. That got me wondering whether it used to be longer and perhaps connected to Lake Lansing Road to the north, so when I got home I checked HistoricAerials.com. No, the street has always been this long. It was created when the neighborhood was developed in the 1960s. When it was built, there was nothing north of here but farm fields. Today there is an office park. Perhaps they were leaving open the possibility of expanding the neighborhood to the north.
Looking north at the entirety of Somercroft Drive.
The sidewalk looks like its only possible use would be for children walking to and from Post Oak school, although it is on the wrong side of the road for that and does not connect with any path that leads to the school. In fact, given that it seems like a relatively low-use sidewalk, I am impressed that it got work done as recently as 2006.
I wonder what the shortest named street in Lansing is. This one has to be in the running.
