I took another walk around Urbandale this evening and made a point of walking on the tracks of removed sidewalks. (I discovered that the 700 block of Francis has the longest ex-sidewalk I’ve found yet.) But that’s not the point of this entry. No, this one is to show a name I haven’t covered yet, Don Otis. It’s on the west side of South Fairview Avenue between Elizabeth and Harton.
I wish I could tell you more about Don Otis, but all I know is that he advertised cement work in the Lansing State Journal between 1951 and 1973.
Here’s a closer look at the date in case you want to second guess me on it.
The house this one is in front of was built in 1968, the same year as this stamp. (At least, I think so, though the last digit is a little indistinct and I’m willing to entertain the idea that it’s a 1966.) That’s an unusually “new” house for the neighborhood.
This McNeilly stamp, on the east side of Clifford Street between Eureka and Prospect, is clearer than others I’ve seen, but only the name. The date, unfortunately, is illegible, at least until I get it in a more favorable light. It’s probably 1970s.
Looking north on Clifford on a beautiful spring day.
This neighborhood, down near the railroad tracks and I-496, is a short walk from my house, but I haven’t explored it thoroughly yet. I will probably correct that soon, since I’m getting a bit bored with my usual rambles. The neighborhood was developed by the Lansing Improvement Company and has many interesting old houses. Check out some old Lansing Improvement Company letterhead courtesy of the Capital Area District Library’s digital local history collection. There are some names you may recognize on there, including Edward W. Sparrow, Eugene Cooley, and one Horatio H. Larned.
I love how the moss has filled in some of the letters. Based on close inspection and feeling it with my fingers I think the date is 1926.
This stamp is on the south side of Larned between Jones and Holmes. There is a stretch of sidewalk here, but no homes on this side of the street. Instead there is a park-like area behind which I-496 looms. I was surprised to find sidewalk here, since as I have noted, blocks or side of blocks with no houses commonly have no sidewalk. I deduced that this side of the street once had houses, and they were probably removed during the 496 project. Afterward I checked HistoricAerials.com and that confirmed my theory.
Looking southeast toward the 496 overpass.
It’s surprising that the sidewalk was never removed in the intervening years, given how they have been tearing sidewalk out of the depopulated blocks of Urbandale. It doesn’t serve much purpose now. It stops suddenly before reaching any useful destination, and anyone actually trying to get somewhere on Larned will surely be walking on the other side, where the remaining houses are. For some reason they just never decided to pull it out, despite it being an orphaned vestige since the late 1960s. The most recent stamps on it are a pair of E.F. Sheets stamps from 1963. I expect they won’t bother repairing anything there again.
Looking east so as to give a better view of where the sidewalk suddenly ends.
This worn V.D. Minnis stamp is on the west side of Shepard Street between Stanley Court and Kalamazoo. Unfortunately, like almost all V.D. Minnis stamps (here is a notable exception) it is undated.
The stamp is close to centered in the slab, unusually.
The same stamp, a little closer for detail.
Looking south on Shepard; this is just a house or two south of Stanley Court.
Today’s entry is a direct sequel to yesterday’s, as I decided to walk to the 200 block of Regent and check whether there were any Spink stamps in front of the former house of Douglas Spink, Jacob’s son. There were not, so I continued on across Michigan to Horton Avenue and revisited the stamp that originally spurred my research into Spink. The stamp is on the front walk of a house on the east side of the street between Jerome and Vine.
The stamp is above a shallow step.
J.K. Spink died in 1952, and while it’s possible that the company carried his name for a while after that, I don’t see any ads like that in the 1950s Lansing State Journal. Instead I see ads from either Douglas Spink or just Spink Builders appearing by the time of this stamp. I wonder if Douglas just didn’t bother getting a new stamp for a while after taking over the business.
Looking southeast on Horton. It was raining, but I had to get my walk in anyway.
I had a stamp on Horton Street sitting on my back burner list for a while and decided to go out and get it today. It rained when I was first going to set out, so I decided to switch things around and do the research first, then get the photo later. I had written down “J.M. Spink” as the contractor’s name, but it turns out that I likely misread the worn stamp. Instead, I had probably seen the work of J.K. Spink, who was advertising in 1940s Lansing State Journal classifieds as a contractor and remodeling specialist.
As usual when I have a distinctive name to work with, Find A Grave was my friend. I found a Jacob Kent Spink buried in the Maple Grove Cemetery in Mason. (There is a photo of him as a young man at the memorial page there, if you want to get better acquainted.) From there I was able to search for his name in the LSJ and find his obituary, published July 21, 1952. According to that, Spink was a building contractor and World War I veteran. He was born in Toledo but grew up in Michigan, attending Mason High School and then the University of Michigan. Sadly, he was only 56 when he died. Of interest to me was noticing that he lived on the west side of the 300 block of Regent Street at the time of his death, and it was the same address that appeared in his business ads.
I did walk up to Horton Street where the stamp that originally spurred this research was located, but on a hunch I decided to pass his old house on the walk back. And this is what I found in the driveway, bumping my original planned stamp for today.
I can just make out the “K,” I think, though the J is pretty well gone. I am sure it is him, though.
Spink’s son Douglas carried on in the contracting business, as I see advertisements in the 1950s for a contractor using either his name or “Spink Builders.” I discovered that Douglas also lived on Regent Street, on the 200 block. As I didn’t find this out until after my walk I didn’t know to go check for work there too, but I will put it on my ever-sprawling list of places to visit.
This stamp is on the west side of Bingham Street between Michigan and Prospect, in front of the parking lot for the Pilgrim Congregational church. That’s where I vote now that Bingham (Street) School is gone.
This one is interesting because of its date. 1970s stamps are the least common decade I find (that is, from the 1920s on). There are a lot of 80s stamps, a fair few 60s stamps, but only a smattering of 70s stamps around the east side.
Looking at the church, with the stamp above located to the lower right of the graffiti.
Unfortunately, this is one of those cases in which the contractor’s name is too common for me to narrow down who it is. I can’t find a history of a Carlson Construction company in metro Lansing, though there have been Carlsons in Benton Harbor, Byron Center, Otsego, and Saranac, the last being the closest.
Another stamp in this cluster. I think there are four of them in this stretch.
“Another Regent Street stamp?” you say. Ah, but it’s the other Regent Street this time, the Regent that resumes south of I-496, in the Potter-Walsh neighborhood. This stamp is on the west side of Regent between Perkins and the southern dead end, along with a couple of others from the same company that are less legible.
I walked over the Aurelius Road overpass to take a last few photos of the railroad bridge before construction begins in earnest. The sidewalk has been officially closed for a day, but I figured not too much had probably happened yet and I could get away with one illicit trip onto the bridge. As a side trip, I went down the sidewalk that cuts from Aurelius to Clemens, into Potter-Walsh, and took these photos.
Looking north on Regent. The other two United stamps in the vicinity are near the other end of this house’s lot.
Unfortunately I can’t be enlightening about who United was. A few contractors with some variation of the name “United” show up in searches, but none located in mid-Michigan and none with a specialization in concrete.
Not much to say about this one; just continuing to plug away at eventually cataloguing the entirety of Regent Street. This presumed pair of C. Gossett stamps (I know it looks like “O” but elsewhere I have seen clear enough ones to know it’s “C”) is on the west side of the street.
This one’s almost illegible, but I assume it the partner of the other.
Looking south on Regent. The stamps are somewhere in this stretch…
I took time out from visiting family in Albion for Easter to take a walk in and around Victory Park. I know from past experience that stamps are much rarer in Albion than in Lansing, suggesting they are not required by ordinance there. Most of the ones I found were Miller’s Cement, the same one I found during my Christmas visit. I found one other, on the curb cut leading from the east side of South Ionia Street south over West Oak Street. It’s our old friend Eastlund Concrete, a familiar sight in Lansing.
There’s a vacant lot here now, though Google’s street view shows a house here as recently as 2012. They cut the trees in front of it down too, more’s the pity.
