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Work begins on E. Kalamazoo St.

The work they were getting ready for on the 1700-1800 blocks of East Kalamazoo Street – as discussed in my last entry – and as I predicted, they have started tearing out chunks of sidewalk. I’ll have to check again in daylight, but I believe that this stretch, located outside the former Lucky’s (later Pure Options, now vacant), took out a pair of Cantu & Sons 1987 stamps.

That’s no great loss, I suppose, given how common those stamps are on the east side, but it did cause me to comment to my husband about how the stamps I catalog here are “ephemeral.” Then I corrected myself, “Actually, I guess they’re not all that ephemeral,” and he laughed and agreed. We were both thinking of how old many of them are; it’s quite common to find ones from the 1920s, and not all that hard to find ones that are earlier, as I soon found out when I started making an effort to record them. Still, I suppose what I meant is that any of them could be gone at any time, and there’s no predicting when. That’s why I’m glad I have made an effort to photograph so many.

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Getting ready for a project on E. Kalamazoo St.

Stakes, flags, and spray-painted markings have cropped up all over the 1700-1800 blocks of East Kalamazoo Street, apparently in advance of a construction project. I’m not sure what project is coming – perhaps something related to the Consumers Energy gas pipeline upgrade project? – but it seems likely to result in some new sidewalk, so that’s something to look forward to.

I’m always intrigued by spray-painted markings for underground utilities, but I think my favorite one of the bunch is this question mark, indicating someone was at a loss to explain this bit of twisted metal erupting from the asphalt in the parking lot of (the former) Lucky’s convenience store at Kalamazoo and Regent.

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E. Bellows St., Mt. Pleasant, Kastle Const., 1994

Mount Pleasant has few sidewalk stamps, but I found this one on a curb cut on Bellows Street, at the northwest corner of Bellows and South University. There are several others like it nearby.

The building here, now vacant, was SBX (the Student Book Exchange) until 2018. I miss the days of independent college bookstores. CMU doesn’t have any now and at the rate they’re pushing “Inclusive Access” (a monopolizing opt-out program that automatically charges students for a lousy online copy of a book) their official University bookstore will soon just be a clothing and tchotchke shop. Nearby this abandoned store are several other abandoned storefronts that used to serve CMU students. It is probably not a coincidence that CMU’s student population is around half what it was in 2014.

I can’t tell you much about Kastle Construction of Central Michigan except that they apparently used to be located on Commerce Drive in Mount Pleasant and no longer appear to be in business. I appreciate their leaving behind some stamps for me.

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N. Clemens Ave., Eastlund Concrete, 2023

A well-placed streetlight allowed me to see this, my first 2023 stamp, during my walk earlier tonight. It’s on the west side of North Clemens Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw, and it’s from reliable stampers Eastlund Concrete. But what’s this?

Loyal blog readers (hi, dear) will recall that there are many Cantu & Sons stamps in the neighborhood that bear a 1988 date that is actually a 1987 stamp with a line added to the 7 to correct it. Eastlund saw this and said, “Too neat. Hold my beer.” With no easy way to turn a 2022 stamp into ’23, they evidently just scraped out the last digit before rewriting it by hand. Eastlund, look, I love you guys. You’ve had a variety of different stamps over the years and you use them. These are endearing traits, to a sidewalk stamp blogger. So it’s with affection that I say, c’mon, this is sloppy.

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S. Howard St., new sidewalk but doomed houses

Four houses in a row have been condemned on the west side of South Howard Street between Michigan and Prospect, and I took my camera out there to document them before their eventual demolition. I found a pristine new section of sidewalk in front of them, still marked off with orange cones. Properly speaking this should be a Hall of Shame entry since the sidewalk is unstamped, despite Lansing Township code requiring it, but given Lansing Township’s shoddy record with sidewalks I think I have to consider any sidewalk installlation to be a win.

A sign in front of the houses talks about a hearing to change the zoning for a planned development, and the scuttlebutt is that it is going to be condos. Oddly, the sign gives the current zoning as commercial. The recent sales record sheds some light on this, as until recently they were owned by the Indian Trails bus company. Indian Trails also owns the parking lot at the corner of Michigan and Howard. It was previously a used car lot, and since Indian Trails took it over, it has gotten weedy and overgrown, since all they have used it for is to occasionally park a few of their Michigan Flyer airport buses. In the 2010s sometime all the houses in the 100 block of South Howard were demolished, leaving a vacant lot between the Indian Trails lot and the four doomed houses. I don’t know the full story, but can only speculate that Indian Trails had some plan for these blocks that never went anywhere.

When these 1920s houses are demolished, it will leave only five houses and a couple of businesses remaining on South Howard. The real estate listing cards in the Belon Real Estate Collection from CADL’s digital local history collection reveal that from the early 1960s to early 1970s, nearly every time a house was listed on South Howard it was marked “value in land only,” meaning the houses were worthless and probably best demolished. This was underlined by the way they generally did not bother filling in the year built for the houses, but marked them simply as “OLD.” Yet they kept surviving anyway, until recently.

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Rumsey Ave., Bowden Const., undated

I found this very plain stamp on a front walk on the west side of Rumsey Avenue between Michigan and Jerome. Unfortunately, it’s undated. I think there may be some other Bowden marks on driveways nearby so I need to return to the area and see if I can find a dated one next time.

This is my first Bowden stamp, and I can’t seem to figure out who that is. I can find evidence of a Bowden Construction in Mason, but they seem to be a roofing contractor, so that doesn’t really make sense.

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N. Foster Ave., Louis Guinette, 1928

I’m kicking off the fourth year of the blog in style, with a brand new stamp, and a beautiful one. Just look at that clear impression and the artistic vignette effect! I just stumbled across this yesterday on someone’s driveway on west side of North Foster Avenue between Michigan and Vine, which is a block I walk all the time.

Every time I decide that I must have found every unique stamp on the east side something like this happens.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything out about Louis Guinette. Searching for his name gets me no hits in the State Journal, and Find a Grave doesn’t even know of a grave anywhere in Michigan for someone named Louis Guinette.

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Another year gone by

Today is the third anniversary of Capital City Sidewalks, a blog I started on a whim (with a placeholder name that I stuck with) because I had started a daily walking habit during the lockdown. I still have that daily walking habit but the blog decreased to three times a week on its first anniversary and twice a week on its second. I think you can guess what the third anniversary brings: another reduction in posting frequency.

Anyone who has been reading regularly has surely noticed that I’m running low on new and interesting stamps to showcase, and have been more often resorting to tangential topics and apologies. I have exhausted, or nearly so, the contractor stamps available in my usual walking radius; while I obviously have not catalogued every stamp on Lansing’s east side, I believe I have at least one example from each contractor, including style variations when they have more than one. Every once in a while I still turn up something new but those finds are getting further and further apart. I’m not done being interested in finding new ones, but it will require more forays into other neighborhoods and I can’t guarantee that I will be able to do that regularly enough to keep posting twice a week.

So, I will be switching to one post a week, most likely on Fridays, starting this coming Friday. I hope that will allow me to get a reserve of new material to use, and I hope that keeping up at least some posting schedule, even if it’s a less frequent one, will continue to reinforce the blogging habit so that this project doesn’t peter out entirely. I’ve been quite proud of keeping it up for this long, and I’ve also learned a lot about the history of my neighborhood and Lansing in the process.

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Jerome St., DPW, 1930s(?)

I found this very worn and craggy Lansing DPW stamp on Jerome Street, near the northeast corner of Jerome and Ferguson. The date is impossible to be certain about but it looks to me like something in the 1930s, possibley 1939, which is consistent with it being what I call a “second style” DPW stamp.

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Walter Neller, Sidewalk Sweeper

I have nothing new for the blog right now but while poking around looking for old sidewalk news, I did run across a piece from the June 26, 1993, Lansing State Journal Opinion pages lamenting the death of real estate developer Walter Neller at the age of 89. It calls him “legendary” and ends by saying that “his imprint on Lansing remains for generations to come.” Yet the only accomplishment they mention in the brief memorial is his history keeping the downtown sidewalks clean: “Early in his career, Neller swept a city walk clean as a downtown bakery employee. Later, he paid a worker to brush the Washington Avenue concrete.”

I confess I knew nothing of Neller, but the Michigan State University Archives has his family papers, and they provide a biography there. I note that he was a founder of the defunct Lansing Civic Players, formerly housed in the fire station on Michigan Avenue (now Brenner Heating & Cooling).