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S. Foster Ave., E.E. Lockwood, 1937

I noticed this very worn stamp on a driveway apron in front of a house on the west side of South Foster Avenue between Michigan and Prospect. It’s fairly wordy, suggesting it may give a city as well as a name, although it may just say “cement contractors” or something.

I looked around to see if there is a matching one and there is, or at least I think so, on the sidewalk nearby. Unfortunately it’s no more legible.

I was getting ready to put this post through when I decided to take one more look at the name to see if I could make it out. It was bothering me how close I was to being able to read it. I started thinking I saw “Lookwood” but decided that didn’t really sound like a name. What about Lockwood? I thought that sounded more like a plausible name. A Google search for “Lockwood concrete lansing” turned up the October 19, 1934 issue of the East Lansing Press, courtesy of Central Michigan University’s Digital Michigan Newspapers collection. There on page six I found this:

220 M.A.C. Avenue is now part of a big commercial building with condos on the upper floors. It would have been located about where CVS is today. Although I was in town when that block was redeveloped, I can’t seem to shake loose a memory of what it looked like before or what was there.

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Elizabeth St., [?] Buonodono?, undated

I found this faint stamp on a walk leading from the back door of a house facing Allen, on the southwest corner of Allen and Elizabeth Streets. The walk extends diagonally northwest toward Elizabeth.

I can’t make out the name exactly although I think it is [initial] [initial] Buonodono, maybe R.D. I haven’t been able to figure anything out about the contractor. It is undated, but the house was built in 1923 so perhaps it dates to then.

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Gilroy Gardens (Gilroy, California), [Syc]amore Concrete, 2018

We took our (nearly) annual roller coaster vacation to California this year, to visit a few parks in and near the southern Bay Area. One of those parks was Gilroy Gardens in Gilroy, California, the so-called Garlic Capital of the World. It’s an arrestingly scenic park, less an amusement park than a botanical garden that has some rides. One of their most popular rides are paddle boats in the shape of ducks, geese, and swans, which give you free roam in the small lake at the center of the park. It was on a bridge near the boats that my husband spotted a sidewalk stamp.

One of the posts for the guardrail has obliterated the first few letters of the contractor’s name, but I looked at a list of concrete contractors in Morgan Hill and the only one that matches is Sycamore Concrete Construction. Unfortunately I can’t find a Web site or any other information about them, except for a listing at OpenCorporates which shows the corporation being founded in 1985 and dissolved in 2022.

It seems odd that they bothered stamping a spot where it would end up being illegible, but I have to assume they did not know where the guardrail was going to be placed when they did the stamping. Maybe it was a later addition and the original fence was outside the concrete.

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I Found J.R. DeHoney’s Place

I was recently perusing the Belon Real Estate Collection, as is my wont, and came across something serendipitously. The Collection is part of the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection and has been fully digitized. It consists of a set of cards used by the Belon Real Estate Agency with information on properties for sale (whether listed with them or not) from the early 1950s through early 1970s.

While poring over old records for Charles Street, one of the streets in Lansing Township south of Michigan Avenue and west of US-127, I happened to see a photo of a garage with a sign reading “J.R. DeHoney, cement contractor.” DeHoney has been represented in this blog by a very small handful of hard-to-read stamps. The Belon card shows his business located at 234 S. Charles St. The owner is given as J.R. DeHoney and wife, and it appears that he listed the building for $18,500 in 1964 but it did not sell. The card notes, “South wall to be common wall with building to be built on next lot south.”

Today the building is still recognizable, and indeed it was added to on the south side. Together the buildings now comprise Longwood Automotive Repair and have the street address 238 S. Charles.

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Prospect St., Eastlund Concrete, 1989

This Eastlund Concrete stamp is on a curb cut leading to the walkway to the side (Prospect Street) door of the former Unity Church on the corner of Prospect and Holmes, which I’ve written some about previously.

I pass the former church a lot and I’m sad to see that it’s still in a state of abandonment after its fire in 2019. Someone bought it and got the zoning changed to allow it to be converted into apartments. Granted, I can’t see inside, but I have the impression that renovation activity ceased at least a year ago.

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Hall of Shame: Eureka St., Worst Sidewalk on the East Side

Is this the worst piece of sidewalk in Lansing? Probably not, but it is the worst one I can think of on the east side, and I’ve walked all over the east side. It’s worse than no sidewalk at all since it’s an outrageous trip hazard. It looks like the rubble left after a Godzilla attack.

Of course, the culprit is not Godzilla or even Godzilla weed (though eventually I think the east side is going to be destroyed by the latter), but the usual suspect: a big old tree. These things happen and I’d rather have trees and busted sidewalks than perfect sidewalks on barren avenues. It’s the length of time this has been broken that lands this in the Hall of Shame. It has been this bad for at least the time I’ve been walking this stretch regularly (that is, around three years) and probably longer, and the most the city has done about it is spray fluorescent paint on all the edges. That doesn’t help much with my night-time mountaineering expeditions over it.

Anyway, in case anyone wants some advance warning, it’s on the south side of Eureka Street between Rosamond and Clifford.

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Regent St., graffiti

This bit of sidewalk graffiti is very familiar to me. It’s on the east side of Regent Street between Michigan and Kalamazoo (more specifically, the 200 block) and I pass it all the time since I only live a block or two away. It appears to read “MERC” and I often muse about it. I have worked out in some of my past blog entries that a name in the walk almost certainly belonged to someone who once lived in that house. The most likely guess in this case is the same. And yet…

As I walked by it this evening I got to thinking about what kind of name, or nickname, “Merc” is. Was it short for something? What name could it even be short for: Mercedes? Then it came back to me: when I first moved to Lansing, the girl who lived next door with her (apparently) single mother was named Mercedes. She went by “Merce,” as I would have spelled it, though as I never saw it spelled out should could have spelled it “Merc” for all I know. If a Virgil can be Virg pronounced Verge, than a Mercedes can be Merc pronounced Merce. She introduced me to how startlingly children serve as a proxy for the passage of time. My first year in the house she was young enough to go trick or treating and then one day I realized I hadn’t seen her in a while. The last time I saw her next door – presumably returning for a visit – I saw that she was a young adult and I could barely understand how or when that had happened. I think it wasn’t too much later that my neighbor moved away too.

I have no reason to think this mark was left by the Merc(e) who was one of my original neighbors, especially since it wasn’t left in front of her old house which is, as I said, a couple of blocks away. But I can’t rule it out, either. After all, if you were the right age and walking by a freshly-poured slab of concrete, and had a stick handy…

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S. Homer St., Cioffi & Son, undated

This undated stamp is from the west side of South Homer Street between Prospect and Michigan, in front of A & J Transmission. I previously found a stamp with the name just reading “Cioffi,” dated 2021, in the Sycamore Park neighborhood (near Potter Park). At the time I wrote, “The only Cioffi Construction I can find is based in Akron, and I can’t imagine that one would be doing work in metro Lansing.”

So much for my lack of imagination. Indeed, a Cioffi out of Akron is laying sidewalks in Lansing, but this time it’s Cioffi and Son. Did a son join the business, making this the later stamp? Or did the father retire, making this the earlier one?

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S. Clippert St., M & M Concrete, 2007

Back in metro Lansing (the Township, to be precise): I found this one in front of the Riverwalk Apartments on the west side of South Clippert Street between Prospect and Michigan. I don’t recall ever walking this block before.

For some reason, I like the contrast between the neat typeface of the name and the handwritten quality of the date.

There have been several M & M Concretes in Michigan, including one in St. Clair and another on the opposite side of the state in Fruitport, but I would guess this one was the one that used to be in Charlotte but appears to be defunct.

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City of Detroit Sidewalk Marking Code

City of Detroit, you rock. I decided to finish my presentation of the stamps I saw in the Fox Theatre by checking on Detroit’s sidewalk stamp rules. I could tell that they must require them, since they were thick on the ground there, even compared with Lansing. Lansing may have earned my respect by codifying sidewalk stamps, but Detroit’s sidewalk stamp ordinance is on another level:

The Contractor’s name and the year in which the walk or drive was laid shall be carefully and clearly impressed in the concrete surface of each isolated flag, each flag at the property line, and in each end flag or slab of two or more adjoining flags or slabs. Each individual flag adjacent to a tree, whether arced or not, shall be also marked, as directed by the Engineer.

The stamp or plate used for marking shall have an approximate maximum dimension 100 mm x 150mm (4 x 6 inches), outside dimension. The Contractor’s name and the current year’s date shall be in such characters and arrangement that legible and indelible impression may be made in the concrete.

The work will be considered incidental to the cost of construction.

Sec. 12.III.12: “Contractor’s Stamp,” Standard Specifications for Paving and Related Construction, City of Detroit Department of Public Works, March 2009

The very detailed and strict set of rules mostly speaks for itself, but two points stand out. One is that it requires stamping not just at the start and end of a run of sidewalk but at the property line and, curiously, adjacent to each tree. The other is the last line, “The work will be considered incidental to the cost of construction.” I assume that means “Don’t try to charge extra for installing stamps” and it makes me wonder if there were incidents that resulted in adding that clause.