As a followup to yesterday’s entry, I decided to head around the corner past Dagwood’s and walk the blocks of South Howard Street. I knew that the sidewalk was incomprehensibly intermittent there, and thought it would be interesting to capture a stamp from this strange liminal zone.

Disappointingly, I didn’t find a single stamp until I just about got to the southwest corner of Michigan and Howard. The stamp is just south of the corner. So here you go: the only sidewalk stamp on South Howard is this S & N Contractors stamp from 2000.

The remarkable scarcity of stamps led me to wonder if Lansing Township lacks a sidewalk marking requirement. It would be in keeping with its slapdash approach to sidewalks. It turns out, however, that they do have a sidewalk marking requirement:

All concrete walks and approaches shall have the name of the contractor constructing the walk, together with the year same is constructed, stamped in the surface of the walk near each end thereof, and at least once in the surface of each approach.

Section 21-3.8, Lansing Township Municipal Code

I saw one short section of new-looking sidewalk on Howard that should therefore be in the Hall of Shame.

The property adjacent to this stamp is currently just a big, empty, somewhat overgrown parking lot. It’s owned by the bus company Indian Trails and they use it to park the Michigan Flyer airport bus, which seems like an underutilization of the space. Prior to becoming bus parking, it was a car lot, the name of which I can’t remember if I ever knew. Going further back, I see Lansing State Journal advertisements for the Lansing Overhead Door Company at that address. It was there at least as early as 1935 and as late as 1978. The first mention I can find of a new address for Overhead Door is in 1981, by which time they had moved to East M-78, and there they remain today.