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E. Michigan Ave., Isabella Corp., 2016

This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Regent and Clemens. Isabella Corporation is based in Mount Pleasant, which is in Isabella County. Their business address is on Commerce Street. Despite the fact that I have worked in Mount Pleasant for fifteen years, I don’t know where that is without looking it up. As a commuter, I really only know the area around my workplace and a couple of places that co-workers like to gather. I think this might be the furthest out of town any of the contractors have been from, among those I could identify. Mount Pleasant, as I very well know, is around an hour’s drive away.

The stamp is in front of the building with the front ramp pictured below. It’s a big old (1916) American Foursquare house that has been converted to an office at some point. Such houses are common on this stretch of Michigan.

Looking west on Michigan Avenue at dusk. The Little Free Library and “take/leave” boxes belong to the office (a similar house) outside the frame to the left.

I’m not sure what, if anything, is in the house right now. I still think of it as “where the anarchist bookstore used to be” even though that is very long gone and was there only briefly. I have memories of walking home from the Michigan and Clemens bus stop after work, passing the Brighter Days Infoshop. I never went in there, but I remember people often seemed to be hanging around on the porch, which was open at the time. (I think it looked a lot better that way.) In my memory, this spans a greater time than in reality. In fact, I was very surprised when I discovered that Brighter Days opened in August 2003 and was closed by early July 2004. The building spent much longer as a chiropractor’s office and yet for some reason that’s not what’s lodged in my memory.

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E. Michigan Ave., Unknown, 1958

I’ve been meaning for a while now to get around to this stamp on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Foster and Hayford. The date is clear but the contractor’s name is illegible. I thought I recognized the style of the stamp as belonging to The Christman Builders, who stamped a long stretch a few blocks further east in 1960. But once I had the photos side by side I realized they do not have the same shape after all. There are two of these stamps in front of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, one on each end of the lot, suggesting that the whole sidewalk might have been done at that time and they marked the beginning and end of the work.

I can’t say with anything like confidence, but I still wonder if this isn’t Christman. The words as far as I can make them out are not inconsistent with their name and the font of the date is the same. The shape is not exactly the same but the style is similar. I will have to see if I can find any other Christman stamps.

Continuing my exploration of the changes along the far eastern edge of Lansing’s share of Michigan Avenue, I did some research on the Enterprise Rent-a-Car building, 2311 East Michigan. It was built in 1950, probably as a car lot. Its original occupant might have been Harry Smith, Inc., a car dealer. At least I find that Harry Smith was located in that spot by 1955 according to advertising in the Lansing State Journal. The Lansing State Journal of December 21, 1955 (page 21) identified Wayne Foster, the manager of Harry Smith, Inc., as the chair of the inaugural Lansing Auto Show, which would be held the following spring in the new Civic Center.

By 1959, the address starts showing up in advertisements for Red Whiting’s Dependable Used Cars. I haven’t been able to narrow down when Harry Smith’s moved out and Red Whiting’s moved in, so I’m not sure which business was here when the stamp was fresh. Surprisingly, Red Whiting’s stayed in this location until 1981, when they began advertising their new location at 2301 North Larch Street (see page 23 of the December, 11, 1981 LSJ.) The business seems to have finally closed in 2005. Their former Larch Street location is a different used car place now.

Meanwhile, through the 1980s the Michigan Avenue location continued to be a used car lot, first Action Motors and then Riverside Motors. In 1992 Enterprise Rent-a-Car moved into that location. I was surprised to discover it has been there longer than I have been in town; that site just always looks transitory to me, somehow.

Update 9/30/20: I caught sight of this one again on my walk tonight and the wet pavement made some details more visible. I am now pretty sure the second word is “company.” I am less sure, but think the last two letters of the first word are “on.”

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S. Clemens Ave., Michigan Concrete Floors, 1963

I walked to the zoo today with my husband, a route that took us over I-496 (the Olds Freeway) via South Clemens Avenue. Clemens “turns into” Aurelius Road on the south side of 496. So most people would say, but technically, it stays itself, just in another place. There is a South Clemens on the other side of 496, detached from the South Clemens that becomes Aurelius. A lot of north-of-496 people probably don’t even realize that. There are what I jokingly call “alternative universe” or “other” versions of several of my familiar neighborhood streets. “The Other Regent,” “The Other Leslie,” and so on.

I had to take this one from further away than usual to get the stamp and the edge of the pavement in at the same time. I usually do it that way to give a sense of where the stamp is located in the slab. This one was usually far from the edge.

Anyway, on the last block of Clemens as it starts to turn into the approach to the overpass, as far south as one can go and still be on the east side (as 496 is the conventional southern edge of the neighborhood), I found this stamp from an unfamiliar contractor. It is on the west side, in the 600 block.

Here’s a closer look at the stamp itself. It’s a rather boring one, but clear.

My attempts to find much of anything out about Michigan Concrete Floors have resulted in a flood of irrelevant search results, for obvious reasons. I did find the existence of a business that incorporated from 1982 to 1987 called Michigan Concrete Floors, Inc., that was based in Eaton Rapids. I’m inclined to think this is probably the same company, although the name is generic enough I can’t be confident. Another Michigan Concrete Floors, Inc., based in Sterling Heights, incorporated and dissolved several times in the 1990s (eventually becoming Imperial Concrete Floors). They don’t share an address or any other details that I can see, so I would guess the Sterling Heights and Eaton Rapids companies were unrelated. There are still more questions than answers for this one and I’m afraid I’ll have to leave it there for now.

Looking south on Clemens as it begins to rise toward the overpass. The stamp is actually behind me.
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E. Kalamazoo St., BBRPCI, 2003

BBRPCI (B.B.R. Progressive Concrete, Inc.) stamps are a dime a dozen in the neighborhood, but most are from the 1980s. This one, and a few others on the same block, are notable for being the newest BBRPCI stamps I have yet found. I don’t exactly know when the company ceased to exist, but OpenCorporates shows them incorporating in 1979 and dissolving in 2016.

This one is right in front of the entrance to the former Allen Street School on the south side of East Kalamazoo Street between Shephard and Allen. The school was built in 1913 and expanded in 1926. It closed in 2005 and the building was purchased by the dystopian-sounding biotechnology company Neogen. This was hailed as a victory for preservation.

In writing this, I suddenly realized something I had been rather oblivious to. In my early years in Lansing, I often walked to the bus stop at Michigan and Clemens to get to work in the morning, and on the way would cross with help from the light at Kalamazoo and Clemens. There would be a crossing guard there helping children cross safely, just like when I was a kid walking to and from elementary school. (Do they even let children walk to school anymore?)

One day years later, well after I had quit riding the bus regularly, I suddenly thought: hey, what happened to the crossing guard? When is the last time I saw one there? I realize now what it was. Those children were going to Allen Street School, and the crossing guard disappeared with the school, around the same time I started working a job I had to drive to anyway. I missed the moment when that changed because my own life changed at the same time.

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S. Magnolia Ave., White Hawk, 2020

I was excited when my husband alerted me to the newest sidewalk in the neighborhood, so I made sure to head that way on my walk today. This is my youngest stamp yet. The caution tape was still in place! It turned out that a significant portion of the sidewalk along the west side of South Magnolia Avenue between Kalamazoo and Marcus is new, and across the street they seem to be preparing to do more. I also saw some new ones around the corner on Marcus Street.

I’m a little worried that the date doesn’t seem like a deep impression on any of their stamps. Some future sidewalk stamp chronicler may have trouble making it out.

I’ve never seen a stamp from this company before, and I haven’t learned much about them. They don’t have a Web site. I found them on OpenCorporates (a site I’m glad I discovered) where it says that White Hawk Concrete, L.L.C., incorporated in 2018 and has an address on Rundle Avenue. I had never heard of Rundle Avenue either, but it turns out it is in the Moores Park neighborhood, the land of twisty streets.

See? Brand new!
This is to give an idea how much of Magnolia sports new concrete. This is actually taken from the other end of the block from the stamp pictured.
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S. Foster Ave., G & M, 1992

I stopped to check this one out because for a moment I thought it was a style of O & M stamp I hadn’t seen before, and I have been trying to catalogue all those variations. Instead I found a stamp from the mysterious G & M, on the east side of Foster Avenue between Prospect and Michigan.

I wish I could say the vignetting was an artistic choice, but it’s really because of having to use a flash since it was night. That’s also why I took this one from a bit farther away than usual.

I haven’t been able to find out much about G & M. I am guessing they were the G & M Construction Corporation, which I can find an entry for in OpenCorporates. They incorporated in June 1995 and dissolved in 2003.

This was the best angle I could find for making the date (1992) legible.

Assuming this is the same G & M Construction Corporation, they were located on Pollard Road in southwest Lansing at an address that seems to just serve as a house today.

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Prospect St., J.F. Sowa, 1908

I had an exciting find tonight: another stamp from the aughts. I’m not sure how I haven’t noticed it before, since it’s quite a clear one and I often walk this street; I can only guess that it means I usually walk on the other side. It is on the north side of Prospect Street between Jones and Holmes (just east of Jones).

Trying to find out anything at all about the J.F. Sowa responsible for this stamp has been foiled by the fact that a person with the same leading initials and last name is an important personage in computer science. If I try for “J.F. Sowa” and “Lansing,” I get a lot of articles that include citations to Sowa alongside citations to other authors who happened to publish with Michigan State University Press. Adding “concrete” or “cement” to the name does not help, for reasons I will leave as an exercise to the reader. If I exclude the word “conceptual” in order to filter out results that refer to Sowa’s most cited book, Conceptual Structures, it does cut the results down to a handful, but none of what’s left is useful.

The J.F. Sowa stamp in context, looking west on Prospect Street.

The slab is in rough shape, covered in spidery cracks. Still, it’s impressive for it to have survived 112 years, and I think it is in the best condition of the pre-1910 stamps I have found. It looks to have received a neat patch at some point, which appeals to the part of me that enjoys darning socks.

Update 10/25/21: I learned a bit about J.F. Sowa with help from my mom, and wrote an update.