Continuing on Monday’s theme, here is the other street-name stamp that I discovered on a recent evening walk in Albion. It’s at the curved “corner” where Elizabeth Street meets East Erie, informing the pedestrian that this way is Elizabeth. (Presumably there was originally a matching Erie mark, as in Monday’s example, but I wonder if it was on the concrete block closer to Erie, which has obviously been replaced at some point.) I have walked past this many times, but only noticed it on this occasion because the light caught it exactly right; it’s very shallow and worn. I have actually featured this stretch of sidewalk in a previous blog entry due to its interesting curved corner, but as it was winter then, I had no hope of noticing this stamp.
This curved sidewalk at the north end of Elizabeth is not duplicated in any of the nearby residential streets. Those are all squared off and look newer, so perhaps they used to be like this one.
Last year while visiting family in Albion, I discovered a corner (at Erie and Mingo) where the sidewalk had been marked with the names of the intersecting streets. I had never seen anything like it and didn’t see any other similarly marked walks in Albion until now. There was a bit of luck behind this. Normally I take walks at a couple times of day when visiting Albion: either around 5 pm in order to get done before dinner, or at night if I’m looking for Christmas lights. This time it felt too hot yet to go out at 5 and so I waited until after dinner to walk. This resulted in my getting the perfect raking angle of light that causes faint markings to reveal themselves, and I found more of these intersection markings.
This one is at the southwest corner of East Erie and South Huron Streets. “E. Erie St.” was the first one I noticed. It was only after it drew my attention that a closer look also yielded the very faint “S. Huron St.” on the other edge. Each stamp is oriented to parallel the street it names.
Looking north across Erie. Erie’s stamp is on the nearest edge, and Huron’s is on the right edge. Huron is ending here at a T-intersection with Erie.
Sunday will mark the 2nd anniversary of Capital City Sidewalks, which debuted in 2020 with a photo of an undated O&M stamp on Regent Street. Over the last year, as I have exhausted the interesting stamps to be found on Lansing’s east side (where I take my daily walks), I have increasingly covered adjacent topics like utility covers, odd or mysterious sidewalk arrangements, and old newspaper accounts of sidewalk construction issues. At this point I will likely have to continue to widen my focus if I am to keep the blog going, since I am close to wringing out the east side of the last interesting markings. I need to make more frequent trips to other neighborhoods, although it’s possible I will find nothing but the same contractors that are well represented closer to home. I may also need to reduce posting frequency again. A year ago I decided to drop to three times a week after a year of daily updates, which served me very well for a while, but is starting to feel too frequent again. I am considering going to two days, if not now, perhaps when my day job picks up again in a few weeks.
I don’t mean to sound downbeat, however, as I mark my second anniversary. Instead, I want to express my appreciation for the sidewalks of Lansing and how glad I am for having discovered I like learning about them (and about Lansing history, for which they have often served as a proxy). I have found this blog to be a highly satisfying endeavor, and if no one but my husband has been reading, that’s all right. Developing the habit of studying sidewalks so closely, and even having opinions about them, has enriched my life in a small but noticeable way. After all, they are nearly ubiquitous… except in Lansing Township.
I was lucky enough to find a second sidewalk stamp during my recent mini-vacation, this one at Sylvan Beach Amusement Park, a thoroughly charming old park on Oneida Lake, New York. The stamp is in front of an ice cream stand, where I bought a Pepsi float that really hit the spot on a hot day. Sadly, the stamp is undated. The park has been in existence since the 1870s or 1880s (sources seem to disagree on this point) but the pavement is surely not that old. From the condition and style of the stamp, I would make a handwaving guess that it dates from the 1920s or so.
I love that arc layout, which was also popular among Lansing contractors.
N.D. Peters & Co. does not seem to be in business today. The earliest reference I can find to the company is the 1910 Proceedings of the Board of Contract and Supply of Utica, which reports that N.D. Peters & Co was awarded a contract for the construction of artificial stone sidewalks in Utica, “being the lowest bidder therefor” with bids of 14, 15, and 16 cents per square foot for various sidewalks. In 1914, the Proceedings of the Board of Contract and Supply again reports that they were awarded a contract for the construction of artificial stone sidewalks. This time their bid was 16 cents per square foot on all proposed streets “except Book 3, Map 16, Block 17, Lot 2, Elizabeth street, on which they bid 50 cents per square foot.” I wonder why that one lot on Elizabeth Street was so expensive to pave. (I also have noticed in doing research for this blog that the style around the 1910s was not to capitalize “street” when used along with the name of a street, which looks odd to my contemporary eyes.) A 1913 Utica city directory locates the business on Kossuth Avenue.
I’m not exactly sure when N.D. Peters went out of business. OpenCorporates gives its dissolution date as 2001, but that doesn’t always mean the business was still functioning by then (or even that it necessarily ceased to exist in some form). They were at least still around by 1999, when they were found by the National Labor Relations Board to have violated someone’s union contract by failing to recall him after a layoff.
I took a short vacation over the last week to visit a few amusement parks (I have hobbies other than sidewalk photography). While we were walking through the sprawling queue of Flight Deck, a roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland, my husband suddenly pointed at the ground. There was a contractor stamp. I held up the line for a few moments to take this photo, muttering aloud to myself that everyone must be wondering what this crazy woman is doing.
Flight Deck opened under its original name, Top Gun (yes, that Top Gun) in 1995, so this stamp dates to the ride’s original construction. Upper Canada Construction doesn’t have a Web presence, but Google suggests a company by that name currently exists in York, Ontario, which is close to Canada’s Wonderland.
I found this short editorial on page 4 of the the August 7, 1914, State Journal. This was four days prior to the “Bum Walks” city council meeting report that has given me so much joy. Evidently, the subject of sidewalk construction contracts was an ongoing controversy. I will reproduce the article here, as I believe it is out of copyright.
The State Journal‘s recommendation that the city do all of its own sidewalk construction work was clearly not adopted, at least not for long, since otherwise this blog would be 100% Department of Public Works/Department of Public Service/O&M stamps. On the other hand, this has caused me to look over my records and notice that there are certain spans of time in which I do not have any non-DPW stamps recorded. All the stamps I have from 1910 and 1911 are Minnis and Ewer, then I have no stamps collected from 1912 through 1918. The 1918 and 1919 stamps are all DPW, then from 1921 until 1924 there are quite a lot of DPW stamps mixed with a small number of Wm. Meister. Another notable period is 1941 through 1945, during which time all the stamps I collected were DPW.
This Eastlund Concrete stamp is on a driveway apron on the east side of South Clemens Avenue between Kalamazoo and Marcus. There are at least two driveways on this block with the same stamp, suggesting the driveway construction wasn’t just a homeowner’s choice but was probably related to the city doing something that tore up the roadside. Unfortunately, neither is dated.
Here is a minor curiosity on Prospect Street, near the northwest corner of Prospect and Fairview. The sidewalk is indented in two places, most likely where street trees once were. This property has apparently been very unlucky with street trees. There is a relatively small tree along this strip in the 2011 Google street view, but it doesn’t correspond with either of the cut-outs. Even that tree is gone by 2019. It’s a shame when there are gaps like this, but they’re going to keep growing, because sometime around a decade ago the City decided they would no longer replace street trees except where the property owner pays for the replacement. Landlords are not famous for caring about the urban canopy.
I have to apologize for the lack of sidewalk content today. It’s been very hot, so I’ve been taking my walks at night, which isn’t good for finding sidewalk markings to share. So instead I’ll offer a link to an article that has nothing at all to do with sidewalks. The City Pulse has reported today that residents of the part of the Groesbeck neighborhood that lies within Lansing Township have requested to be annexed by Lansing. My immediate reaction was, “Of course they have. We have much better sidewalks.”
Admittedly, I think that the Groesbeck neighborhood itself has adequate sidewalk coverage (though they’re probably not stamped, since I don’t think Lansing Township has a marking ordinance). But the overall better effort with respect to sidewalks in Lansing is surely still a point in the city’s favor.
The May 16, 1940, State Journal has a “Notice to Property Owners of Sidewalk Construction” for a large number of properties on Lenawee, Washtenaw, and Gordon Avenue, all on the west side. I see such notices a lot in the 1910s, but not so often this far into the century. The official verbiage used is nearly the same as it was 25 years previous: “Resolved by the city council of that it Is a necessary public Improvement…” but instead of saying that “a sidewalk shall be constructed” this commands that a sidewalk shall be “repaired.” So evidently, someone had laid a lot of bum walk on Lenawee and Gordon, since it was already in such need of repair by 1940. Also of interest is that the resolution was brought by an Alderman Schneeberger; I don’t know if he was any relation to the E. Schneeberger whose name turns up in 1920s sidewalk markings.
