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Jones St., Minnis & Ewer, 1910

Welcome back to Capital City Sidewalks, or as it will soon be known, the Internet’s premier Verner D. Minnis fan site. Today I have for you a very hard-to-read 1910 Minnis & Ewer stamp from the west side of Jones Street between Prospect and Eureka. I walked out to this spot today specifically to get this one for today’s entry, only to find that it photographed quite poorly due to a glaze of slush that fell on it this morning and was in the process of freezing over. At first I thought I should wait until I get better conditions for a picture, but I wasn’t able to find anything else of interest that wasn’t similarly buried. Besides, I thought to myself, I’m pretty sure by now my readers all know what a Minnis & Ewer stamp looks like. It’s another one with an illegible month, though I was able to make the year legible by scraping the slush out with my bare finger. On est grand par l’amour, et plus grand par les pleurs…

You’ll notice the heavy sprinkling of evergreen needles decorating the stamp. They were contributed by this impressive tree, seen here as I approached the stamp from the north.

A portrait-oriented photo? Isn’t that against the rules?

I suppose all the needles must get tiresome, but I am always rather envious of houses that have majestic evergreens shading their front yards. All my trees are plain old Norway maples, except for the small ornamental cherry the previous owner planted behind the garden pond.

Looking north on Jones from the corner of Prospect. The stamp is in the more cleared area under the tree.

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Allen St., W.P. Bowerman, 1960s

I didn’t need foil after all, just different light. The stamp that had been illegible to me on a previous walk down Allen Street emerged on my walk this afternoon. Mostly, anyway; while I can tell the date is 1960s, I can’t read the last digit. This is on the east side of Allen Street on the block south of Elizabeth.

I found an obituary for Weldon P. Bowerman; he died in 2012 at the age of 90. According to the obituary, he owned and operated Bowerman Waterproofing for over 60 years and was a World War II veteran. Two of the commenters in the online guestbook speak admiringly of how well the basement work he did for them has held up, and how he dug out the basement walls by hand. His business seems to have been based in Potterville.

A closer look, which makes the hardest letter to read – the R – a bit more visible. Sorry I got my fuzzy glove in there too. It’s hard not to.

The 1960s were a time of transition for this neighborhood. It was the end of an era for Stabler Park, which today is an unremarkable sliver of land with a small play structure and a basketball court at the end of this block of Allen Street. (I think of it as the end of Allen Street, but Allen Street actually resumes six blocks south – just north of Potter Park – for one more lonely block.) Prior to the building of I-496, however, Stabler Park had been much larger. It was originally part of the Cameron Farm, which came to be owned by Christian E. Stabler, founder of the C.E. Stabler Coal Company. In 1930 he donated the land in honor of his son and two grandsons who had died in an accident. In the 1950s and 60s, Stabler Park hosted neighborhood carnivals, youth softball, and seasonal ice skating. In 1967, the state bought most of the park from the city to serve as right-of-way for I-496. According to the Lansing State Journal of October 31, 1967, the deed to the land had a clause which prohibited its use for anything other than a park, so the city had to pay off Stabler’s heirs to clear the title. The proceeds from the land’s sale were used to expand Hunter and Foster parks, which was given as a rationale for contradicting Stabler’s wishes. The moral of this and so many other stories like it is, never give land to a city and expect them to use it for what you intend. They will find some way to get around it.

Looking north with the stamp at the very bottom of the photo. I rather wish I’d pointed south toward Stabler Park now that I’ve written the entry, since I ended up writing so much about the park.

Corrected 2/22/21: It was the city, not the state, that paid off Stabler’s heirs.

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Jones St., Minnis & Ewer, July 1910

This stamp is on the west side of Jones Street between Prospect and Eureka. There are quite a few older stamps in the area south of Sparrow. I know this looks like just another case of “can’t pass up a Minnis & Ewer stamp,” but this one is different. See?

The month can be read, for a change (for some reason it’s often marred or too worn to read), but that’s not what’s odd here. What is up with the year? It appears to read “910.” All other dated Minnis & Ewer stamps I have found just render the date like “7 – 10” – never, that I’ve seen, including the first two digits of the year. That seems to rule out that it was “1910” and the “1” wore away. Besides, the rest of the numbers are clear enough, and there isn’t the slightest impression where a “1” would be. I just don’t know what’s going on here. Anyway, it’s almost certainly meant to indicate 1910, a very common date for Minnis & Ewer stamps in this neighborhood.

Here’s a closer look, showing that there doesn’t appear to be a missing “1.”
Looking north on Jones Street.
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N. Fairview Ave., T.A. Forsberg, 1960

Finally I have a completely new one for you again. It’s on the west side of North Fairview Avenue between Jerome and Vine.

T.A. Forsberg, Inc. is a real estate development company based in Okemos. It was started by Terry “T.A.” Forsberg in 1950 and was originally a construction company specializing in roads and underground utilities. Terry Forsberg died in 2015. According to his obituary, Forsberg phased out of the construction business and into real estate development in the early 1990s. The current president of Forsberg is Brent Forsberg, Terry’s grandson.

The stamp is on the closest block in this photo, but facing the other way. I took the photo from this direction to show off some pleasant late holiday lights in the distance. Longtime readers of this blog (hi Joseph) know that I haven’t given up seeking out lights displays on my walks.
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S. Fairview Ave., Cantu & Sons, 1988

You’re probably thinking I’m about to say that due to the snow today and recently, I could only find this one stamp. But no: I probably saw at least a dozen stamps on my walk – not very many, but still enough for a reasonable selection, right?

Wrong. Every one I saw was a Cantu & Sons. And that’s really just how common they are, that a dozen random stamps on the east side have a good chance of all being theirs. Here’s one from the west side of South Fairview Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.

It’s a little hard to read, but this is one of the many stamps where they have ad hoc changed the 1987 date stamp to 1988 by drawing an 8 in.
The stamp is somewhere in that cleared stretch. You can see what I had to work with today.
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Bingham St., Minnis & Ewer, 1910

Good news! The wait is over and I am finally featuring the Minnis & Ewer stamp on the east side of Bingham Street between Eureka and Prospect that I teased back in January. You know, the one adjacent to the surprising-to-me 1927 DPW stamp. There’s nothing unusual about it, aside from being over 110 years old, but I will never pass up a Minnis & Ewer stamp.

The month is illegible, though with the snow brushed out it looks like a 6 or 8.

Looking south on Bingham. The stamp is near the center of the photo, with the previously featured DPW stamp just this side of it

I took the establishing photo from further away than usual because I had to record something odd and a little funny. There is about a foot of completely uncleared sidewalk around the border between two houses, with cleared stretches on either side. I can understand there being a dispute about where the boundary is, but whoever cleared theirs second was being petty even by my standards. I want to know what history has led to this point.

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S. Hayford Ave., Cantu & Sons, 1987

This very worn Cantu & Sons stamp is on the east side of South Hayford Avenue just south of Prospect Street. Look, you try finding something more exciting when it dumped eight inches of snow overnight. I was ready to kiss the ground in gratitude every time I got to a cleared sidewalk.

All that snow is very pretty, though.

Looking north on South Hayford. On the right you can see where I set down the bag of Quality Dairy paçzki I had just bought.
This is probably the paired stamp, a bit south of the one above.

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Elizabeth St., DPW, 1939(?)

Snow sometimes works against me, and sometimes with me. I was walking along the north side of Elizabeth Street, and just east of Leslie I saw the snow highlighting some of the letters in a worn, old Department of Public Works stamp. I took some snow with my mitten and rubbed it into the rest of the stamp (feeling awkward as I realized a dog walker had seen me do this) and this is what it looked like. I wonder what the next people to walk this way thought of the white highlighting that I had left behind.

I think that’s probably 1939, but there is a blotch over the last digit that means I can’t be sure it isn’t an 8.

This is the same principle behind rubbing chalk or flour into gravestone inscriptions, except unlike those practices (which are very much frowned upon) this won’t cause any harm. A little while later on my walk, on Allen Street, the snow was my friend again. It caused the start of an old-looking stamp that I’ve never seen before to jump out at me. I’ve walked that block many times without noticing it. I got down on the ground and sprinkled some extra snow, rubbing it in to try to make the stamp legible. I couldn’t quite do it. Besides, where the date would have (or should have) been there was a patch of obscuring ice. I added it to my list of places to check again later.

Looking east on Elizabeth Street, standing on the corner of Elizabeth and Leslie.

I have thought about trying to do rubbings of the sidewalk as people do with gravestones. Even that practice, though not nearly as harmful as rubbing material into the inscription directly, is controversial. It is said to risk damaging an already old inscription, or at least contribute to wearing it down. It sounds absurd, I suppose, to worry about causing wear to something designed to be walked on for a hundred years. But I treasure these fading markings and don’t want to hasten their illegibility. I have picked up a habit of avoiding walking on them. Maybe I’ll try this method of using aluminum foil, which is supposed to be the most harmless way to read gravestones. If, that is, I can get past how self conscious kneeling in front of someone’s house with a sponge and a roll of Reynolds Wrap is going to make me.

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N. Hayford Ave., RW, 1992

Here’s a cryptic one from the east side of North Hayford Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw. It’s the only one like it I’ve seen. I initially took it to read “HW” but on closer inspection I think it is “RW.” The style reminds me a little of the BWL stamps.

Pictured: my shadow, the stamp. Not pictured: the 14 degree air temperature, my chapped lips.

A name with two letters doesn’t give me much to go on. There is an RW Concrete Sawing out of Dorr, but they describe their main lines of business as “Concrete Breaking, Sawing & Drilling.” In other words, they are all about deconstructing concrete, not constructing it. Dorr is also a good hike away, though not an implausible one.

Looking south on North Hayford.

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Notice of Sidewalk Work, July 1987

No new stamp today, I’m afraid. It snowed all day, and I was feeling rather unwell and not up to a long walk, so despite my spending a bit of time trying to sweep something clear with my boot, I found not a single stamp.

View proving that I tried. The channel down the middle of the sidewalk is where I dragged a boot hoping to turn up something, anything.

Instead I’ll give you something I’ve been saving for a day like this. While searching a specific street address in the Lansing State Journal, I accidentally turned up a notice warning property owners of impending sidewalk work on July 29, 1987. It takes up most of pages 8A and 9A and lists hundreds of addresses. The scope is immense. It covers mainly streets from Bingham east to Clemens, and a smattering of addresses further east. Each address has columns for “Total shared sq. ft.,” “Total 100% city sq. ft.,” and “Total 100% owner sq. ft.” I assume that indicates who has to pay for it, but I don’t know how the proportions were decided.

This must be the origin of the extremely numerous Cantu & Sons 1987/88 stamps all over the east side. Next I need to dig up the news that covers how the city decided to do this huge sidewalk project.