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S. Hayford Ave., Bell System manhole cover


Very shortly after I started this blog, I was wondering how long I would need to consistently catalog sidewalk markings before I had earned the right to go off topic and start talking about something else I like: manhole covers. The answer is, evidently, about 14 months, because here it is, the first manhole cover of this blog. This beauty is on Hayford Avenue just south of the southwest corner of East Michigan Avenue and Hayford. The sidewalk here got redone recently due to a large new development, but the cover remained.

My recollection is that it is actually pretty common to see Bell System covers around Lansing. I assume they must date from prior to the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Our local Bell was Michigan Bell. Its “Baby Bell” identity was Ameritech. Ameritech ended up becoming my ISP around 2000 when they brought DSL to my Lansing neighborhood. As a result, I acquired an Ameritech.net email address which has never gone away. It stayed through a couple of buyouts (as my ISP became SBC Global and then AT&T). Eventually I switched ISPs but the email address remains. It is now controlled by Yahoo, and I cannot fathom why someone is still paying for the domain, but it still works. I still give it out as my main email and it forwards to my “real” but less public email address. When I tell people my address now, I have to spell it. Often they don’t know what I’m saying and write something else down. It’s no longer a name people recognize around here. But I hang onto the address as a point of pride (how many people have had an email address two decades?) and will be sad when they eventually notice it still exists and delete it without warning. Apparently the forwarding shouldn’t even still work.

Looking north toward Michigan from Hayford.

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Lathrop St., DPW, 1949?

Since it was dark and the stamp is so worn, you’ll have to take my word for it that this is a Lansing DPW stamp. It’s definitely from the 1940s, the question is what the last digit is. I shone a raking light over it and thought it was 1949. If so, that’s the latest DPW stamp I have found. All the 1950s stamps I have found read “Lansing DPS” instead.

It’s on the east side of Lathrop Street between Prospect and Kalamazoo, and I admit I partly wanted an excuse to show that the neighborhood has started to put its Halloween flair on, like the house this stamp is in front of.

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Regent St., “T. Gallie” graffiti, 1965

This fading graffiti is on the driveway apron of a house on the 400 block of Regent Street (between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth). I often find that such graffiti reflects who lived in the adjacent house at the time, though the research I’m able to do online doesn’t tell me who that was. I do find that in the 1960s, there was a police officer in Lansing named Thomas Gallie. I don’t have any way to connect him with this and it may be a relative or just a sheer coincidence.

I know only a couple of things about Gallie. One is that he was the defendant in a lawsuit, as reported in the February 2, 1966, Battle Creek Enquirer. (Interestingly I was not able to find anything in the [Lansing] State Journal about it.) An MSU senior sued Gallie and three other police officers for brutality, alleging that he was beaten at the police station. The student was later found not guilty of drunken driving, which he claimed he was charged with as a ploy to cover up the beating. The next reference I can find to Gallie is in the February 21, 1968, State Journal, in a summary of recent business of the Police Board. It briefly mentions that Gallie has submitted his resignation in order to take a job with the state, and notes that he is the only officer in the department with a master’s degree.

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Jones St., M & M Const., 1985

This pair of stamps is on the west side of Jones Street between Kalamazoo and Hickory. Jones has one of those puzzlingly inconsistent sidewalks. The north half of this block has sidewalk only on the east side, but the south half has sidewalk on both sides. Then the sidewalk disappears again and never reappears; no other part of Jones has a sidewalk on this side. (The east side also loses its sidewalk south of Bement Street.)

This is the northern, more legible stamp of the pair.

The date of this stamp provides a possible clue as to how this happened. The sidewalk lines up exactly with the backyard of a duplex facing Hickory Street. That house was built in 1985, much later than most of the surrounding properties. I wonder if the city’s policy at the time was to require contractors to install sidewalks facing new residences.

The southern stamp is a lot more worn, probably illegible.

Whatever its origin, it is a nearly pointless stretch of sidewalk. Anyone walking Jones Street is going to use the other side, where there is more consistent sidewalk. One of the side doors to the duplex connects to it, though in an awkwardly roundabout way: the side door walk connects to the driveway and the driveway to the sidewalk, but anyone coming out of the side of the house is probably just going to take the direct route across the lawn.

Looking south on Jones. I’m standing on the approach to an alley that connects Jones with Pennsylvania.

As for M & M Construction of Charlotte, I have been unable to find out anything about them, except that they don’t seem to be in business now.

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Shepard St., DPW (probably), illegible date

I am reasonably confident that this is a Lansing DPW stamp based on the shape, but I really can’t guess the date except that it will be 1920s through 1940s. It’s alongside a business on the southeast corner of East Michigan Avenue and Shepard Street, on the Shepard side of the property. I have done a different stamp on this property before, but I returned to it in order to show off something I’ve stumbled across: real estate listings for properties on East Michigan Avenue.

I’ve looked at the Belon real estate agency cards that CADL has in their collection before, but hadn’t thought to look through the ones for the business corridor. It turns out to be a wonderful peek into what Michigan Avenue looked like in from the 1950s through early ’70s. From it I learned that this shop, which was Discount One Hour Signs for a long time and recently had Campus Scooter move in, was at one time Caruso’s Candy Kitchen. The real estate card, dated 1971, claims the building dates to 1967, but the city’s records indicate that the main building on the corner was built in 1912, and the smaller building to the east was added to it in 1967. The card shows Mr. and Mrs. Peter Caruso trying to sell the business for the reason of retirement. It appears that their listings in August and October 1971 were both unsuccessful. I don’t know what happened after that, but Caruso’s Candy Kitchen still existed as a business for decades afterward. I knew of them due to their presence in the Meridian Mall, near the bookstore where I used to work. They had a soda and ice cream counter as well as selling candy there. After they left, that storefront never got a tenant again, at least not for more than a short stint. Their last outpost was the ill-fated Lansing City Market. They closed in August 2013. There is a Caruso’s Candy and Soda Shop in Dowagiac that is still open, and they seem to have some connection, because in a Facebook page announcing the closing of the Lansing Caruso’s, someone asks about the Dowagiac store and the reply is “it’s just the one in Lansing that’s closing. The store in Dowagiac is still doing very well.”

The stamp location.

The only business I can figure out prior to Caruso’s as this location was Deerfield Furs. I see an advertisement for it in the July 19, 1948, [Lansing] State Journal, and then this one on March 11, 1949:

ANNOUNCING DEERFIELD FURS UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP

Expert Furriers and Designers

FACTORY ON PREMISES

WILL OPEN APRIL 1st WITH A FULL LINE OF SPRING FURS

We Honor AO Guarantees Issued by Previous Owners

1700 E. Michigan Ave.

Remember the New Deerfleld Is Reliable

The front of the building.

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Parker St., DPW, 1980

This is the sidewalk block at the southeast corner of Parker Street and East Malcolm X Street. I’ll call it Parker since the house at this property faces Parker.

It’s of interest for two reasons. First, I have seen two stamps on one block before, but never three (driveways excepted). I think they were trying to make it clear which park of the sidewalk they were marking out, fearing the intersection would make it ambiguous whether they had paved Parker or Main (as it was then called). And speaking of Main, here is the other reason this spot is interesting. Look at the street sign that is at this corner.

Main St. was renamed Malcolm X St. years ago… except, apparently, the 1200 block.

Did they forget to change the sign when Main changed its name to Malcolm X in 2010? Or did this little stub end of the street somehow escape the official name change? I’ve been to this spot before when cataloguing the famous Schneeberger & Koort stamp, the one that brought the wonder of the Bum Walks Controversy into my life, but I did not notice the sign at the time.

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Hall of Shame: E. Grand River Ave., unsigned new sidewalk

I wanted to get a photo of a stamp in front of Westlund’s Apple Market (on the north side of East Grand River Avenue between Hayford and Foster). Unfortunately, there were no visible stamps on either the Grand River or the Foster side of the property. There was, however, a stretch of clearly new sidewalk with no stamp. For shame. Alderman McKinley is turning in his grave.

Westlund’s is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, but it wasn’t always in this location and it wasn’t always Westlund’s. It started as Mike’s Market at on Washington Avenue downtown, then became Mike’s Shop-Rite, part of the former local consortium that also included the lost, lamented Goodrich’s Shop-Rite. Mike’s moved in here, at the edge of the Groesbeck neighborhood, in 1957. Timothy Bowman has a scan of their grand opening advertisement.

Westlund’s, photographed as context for a sidewalk blog entry.

According to their page on Nextdoor.com, the transition to the new name happened when Mike Wickenhiser Jr., son of the original owner, decided to retire, and sold the business to longtime employee Gerald Westlund in 1986. Westlund continued to run the store as Mike’s until 1998, when it was renamed Westlund’s Apple Market. Gerald Westlund’s kids run it now. When I moved to town in 1999, I remember seeing circulars for Westlund’s Apple Market in my mailbox. At the time I had no idea the name was so new. I wondered then, and still don’t know, why it’s called the Apple Market.

Since Goodrich’s and the L&L Food Centers went away in the 2010s, Westlund’s is the last old-fashioned grocery store in town. They have the best potato salad in town and the third best I’ve had (after DelGrosso’s Amusement Park’s and my mom’s, in that order). They also have a spaghetti salad that always goes over well when I bring it to potlucks. I like going in there just for the old time, homey vibe, with the bonus that it’s always easy to park and easy to get in and out when I only need a few things.

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E. Grand River Ave., illegible name, 2019

I found this stamp at the end of a run of newish-looking sidewalk in front of the building that includes M43 Fitness, A Cut Above hair salon, and the Urban Cup. It’s on the north side of East Grand River Avenue, essentially at the spot where Hayford would be if Hayford didn’t disappear for a couple of blocks north of Grand River before resuming.

I may have to return to this one with some foil or else materials to make a rubbing. I can almost make it out, but it’s just too shallow. I believe that it’s formatted with the date flanking the contractor’s logo on either side of vertical lines, like so: “[ 20 | illegible | 19 ]”. The illegible part looks quite brief, as though it might be initials.

The edge of the former pharmacy is just visible on the right. The stamp is at the very far end of this stretch of sidewalk.

I regret now that I didn’t get a picture that includes the M43 Fitness building (2225 E. Grand River Ave.). I didn’t think it was anything very special, but then I got home and did my research and found that its history was more interesting than I expected. In the City Pulse‘s New in Town column on February 15, 2018, it states that the building “has a history of being a watering hole: [owner Scott] Abramouski said the 1959 building had a soda fountain.” A search of the Lansing State Journal turns up the name of the business. It was called Glass Pharmacy. The last time I see its name connected with this address is in 1979. The last time I see it advertised at all, though without an address given, is in 1982. Starting in 1987, advertisements for “East Side Pharmacy (formerly Glass Pharmacy)” begin appearing. The last advertisement I can find for East Side Pharmacy is in 1995.

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S. Fairview Ave., DPW, 1924

I had to check my records several times before satisfying myself that I hadn’t done this one before. It’s in a part of town I walk very frequently and it’s two things I always stop and photograph: a 1920s stamp and a diagonal one. Except for a crack, it’s in really nice shape, too. Somehow, I have missed it before now. It’s on the east side of South Fairview Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.

The house it’s in front of was built in 1910, so it was relatively young when the stamp was place.