Today’s stamp is on the east side of South Clemens Avenue between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. Unfortunately, it’s mostly illegible, except for the date.
The name looks to me to start with the initial J., have a second initial which is possibly an H, and end with “Feister.” I’m very unsure about the F, but “-eister” I’m more confident about. Underneath it is another line seemingly starting with L and possibly consisting of three letters. And then the date, a relatively clear 1928.
The slab in context, looking south on Clemens. It is at the bottom of this photo.
I tried searching for a combination of “cement” or “concrete” and “Feister” in The Lansing State Journal with no luck.
Update 3/31/21: I bet this is actually Wm. Meister.
This is on the north side of Michigan between Fairview and Magnolia, out in front of the MetroPCS that looks like it used to be a rental car place (because it was, but more on that in a future entry). At some point, the sidewalk here was narrowed, leaving only half of this stamp behind. It looks like it was chopped off to make room for a garden or street tree, though all that’s here now is a weedy patch. I had to pull up a mat of encroaching plants to be able to see to the edge. I was rewarded by the discovery of part of a date which had been buried entirely.
I am pretty sure the letter that’s a bit hard to see here at the start is an r, so “-roleum Corp.” Petroleum, I guess, but I haven’t been able to figure out what petroleum business might also have installed sidewalks. The second line seems to be “-tion Div.” which I assume was Construction Division. The number definitely ends in 7, I can tell you that. Unfortunately the crucial number before that one is partly obliterated. What’s left suggests “2” to me.
The slab in context. Notice on the right how the surrounding sidewalk is wider.
I decided to take a walk through the Urbandale neighborhood on this lovely, warm, fall evening. Urbandale was long ago the site of a race track, which was sold to developers in the (nineteen-)teens and made into a neighborhood despite the fact that it is in the 100-year floodplain and has been subjected to damaging floods and evacuations. People have trouble getting insurance because of this and so a lot of houses were abandoned and became derelict. So many houses were torn down over the years that a good chunk of the neighborhood is now community gardens and small farms. The Land Bank is big on those. Anyway, here’s the sidewalk stamp of the day, located on the west side of South Magnolia Avenue between Marcus and the dead end (500 block).
I know, I know. “Another DPW stamp? Yawn.” But I am still trying to narrow down when they switched stamp styles. This one complicates things. It uses the style of the 1940s and later stamps, but I have a stamp logged from 1939 that uses the older-style “Department of Public Works” stamp. That one is quite worn and perhaps I misread the date, but I am pretty sure I have seen other 1930s stamps in this style. I will have to look for a clearer one to confirm.
Looking south on Magnolia. I believe I’m standing on the slab I photographed above. Note the several white colored slabs; those are all brand new ones from White Hawk.
Kind of a boring discovery, I know, but I’m intrigued by the mystery of the (possibly) overlapping dates for the two styles of stamps.
I walked a different route from usual which took me to the east side of South Clemens Avenue between Kalamazoo and Prospect, instead of the west side where I more often walk. And look what I found there.
So the oddly placed 1921 DPW stamp on Regent Street isn’t unique or a misfire after all. There are stamps from both before and after this one that are more conventionally placed. There is even another one from 1924. So my new hypothesis is that there was one particular foreman in the 1920s who liked it this way.
Too bad about the crack; it’s otherwise very clear. It also gives me my new latest date for DPW stamps marking the month as well as the year.
At least I think it’s 1941. That’s what it looks like in person. It’s an extremely worn DPW stamp (I recognize it by the shape and typography of the letters), located on the east side of Regent Street (200 block) between Kalamazoo and Michigan. Funny how unevenly they have worn, given that there are 1930s ones on the same block that are much more legible.
Tired of Regent Street stamps yet? I hope not, because you’re probably going to get more of them. How about Department of Public Works stamps? Same there; I want to see if I can figure out when they transitioned from one style of stamp to the next over the years.
Looking north on Regent.
The slab is a small one, odd sized. You run across truncated ones like this, both older and newer, and I’m not sure how they come about.
This stamp on the north side of Regent Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth (400 block) is, I believe, the newest one on the block. It appears that two slabs were done at the same time but only one was stamped. It’s another stamp using the same template as yesterday’s.
Bolle Contracting is, as the stamp says, based in Clare, a city that calls itself the “Gateway to the North.” I associate it with drives up to our rented cottage in Omena as a kid. When we got to Clare, I got excited because it started to feel like up north. Bolle’s Web site unfortunately does not give a company history. It says they offer excavating, demolition, and abatement.
Looking south on Regent Street.
Someone added a bit of graffiti, but only to the slab that had the contractor’s stamp. It’s as though they found the other one too pristine to mar.
Today’s stamp is in front of the same address as yesterday’s – the Budget/Avis lot on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Kipling and Lasalle Court. It’s just east of Kipling, close to the crosswalk.
The E. T. MacKenzie Company was established in 1982 in Grand Ledge and still has its headquarters there, although it now also has a few branch offices in Michigan and one in Florida. They offer construction, demolition, and remediation services according to their Web site, so I guess you could say they’re a Mack of all trades.
Notice the style of the stamp. I first encountered it as the new style O & M stamp, and have subsequently observed it in use by several contractors. Evidently some third party sells them using a standard template. They look neat enough, but I would sacrifice orderly for unique.
When I started this sidewalk project I don’t think I realized how much time I would end up sinking into researching local business history. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but I also need to tone it down a little. I’ve developed a particular fascination with the stretch of East Michigan Avenue I’ve begun thinking of as “Eastmost.” From what I can tell, it used to be the car salesdistrict. Tonight’s stamp comes from the north side of East Michigan between Kipling and Lasalle Court.
It’s another mystery stamp in the vein of this mystery stamp, but the two of them help fill in the gaps with each other. The faint area on this one matches the Y in the earlier one, and the clear A in this one matches the faint area of the other. Since the other ends in 02 and this one in 03 it’s tempting to treat that as a date. But who or what is “DAY”? And why the odd spacing (or lack thereof)?
This is close to the corner of Kipling, in front of the Avis/Budget car rental agency. The office building was built in the 1990s. The garage on the property (they don’t share a street address, but are part of the same lot according to city records) dates from 1940. I don’t know who the original occupant was, but by in the 1950s it was Hodgson & Osborn Used Cars, as pictured in this 1958 photo filed in the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection. “Note arborist in tree in center of photo,” directs the caption. It appears that the arborist is in the act of taking the tree down. They evidently didn’t replace it, as there is no street tree there now.
Sometime after Hodgson & Osborn, certainly by the 1970s, it became Spartan Auto Sales. In 1981 the address starts showing up in newspaper ads still attached to Spartan Auto Sales but also as the address for Ugly Duckling Rent-a-Car and Ugly Duckling Car Lot. I’m not sure how it was both Spartan and Ugly Duckling at the same time, but that seems to be the case.
Sometime in the late 1980s it became Thrifty and then eventually Budget/Avis. Thus it went through the same progression from a car lot, through a less respectable car lot, to a car rental agency, as the current Enterprise location.
I was surprised to notice this pair of stamps on my walk tonight because I had assumed all the stamps on this block, in front of Feldman Chevrolet (the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Lasalle Court and Detroit Street), were from the same year. These are harder to read than the others but they are presumably also Christman Co. stamps. The ones on the east end of the block are all 1960.
These are on the west end of the block and, like the others, are stamped head to head. The oddity is that these have two different dates, 1954 and 1955. Bud Kouts bought the dealership in 1954 and it continued to bear his name until the 2010s sometime.
The wet pavement and streetlights conspired tonight to make a lot of details more visible. Most notable is that upon passing my old friend the B.F. Churchill stamp it leapt out at me that of course the date on it is 1908. I just hadn’t been willing to see it because it didn’t seem consistent with my research. How did he go from having his own cement finishing business in 1908, to being a dray line operator in 1915, and then working for Reniger Construction in the 1920s? I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised when J.P. Sleight was both a dairy farmer, a coal supplier, and a sidewalk builder.
If I am correct in my new assessment, it’s the best condition sidewalk I’ve seen among the pre-1910 stamps. It should be here a long while to come.
It was hard to get a photo that showed the play of light as I saw it. This is the best I could do.
