This stamp, from the south side of Marcus Street between Clemens and Fairview, is a typical example of a Cantu & Sons stamp with the 1987 date corrected to 1988. There are a lot of ones like that around the neighborhood. The real reason I photographed it, though, was the odd graffiti, added as though an addendum to the contractor stamp: “The Butterfly.”
There is something else scrawled in the corner to the left, but I wasn’t able to make it out in the current light.
Here’s a glamour shot for you. You’ve seen the J. Carter stamp before. The McNeilly stamp hasn’t appeared here before, though others just like it from this vicinity have. But the real reason I wanted this photo is that it just looks so aesthetic when a dusting of snow puddles inside the letters of a contractor stamp. They’re such wonderful little artifacts in all seasons.
This is from the east side of Allen Street between Kalamazoo and Marcus, next to the Neogen building.
I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed this one before. It’s the only J. Carter stamp I have found besides the cluster of them on Michigan Avenue near Sparrow. It’s on the east side of Allen Street between Kalamazoo and Marcus, on the west side of the Neogen building (the former Allen Street School).
In case you thought this blog had strayed too far from its roots, here’s a Cantu & Sons 1988 stamp. I can tell this the faded date is 1988 mainly because I can see the extra line they were in the habit of putting in to change the 7 to an 8 before they finally got around to getting a 1988 stamp. The stamp is in front of the only house that faces the 1900 block of Prospect Street. It’s on the south side of Prospect Street west of Clemens.
When I was new in town I very often had to walk home from the bus stop at Michigan and Clemens, usually by walking south on Clemens and then west on Kalamazoo. This walk got so dull from repetition that I wished I could vary it, and was disappointed by the abrupt disappearance of Prospect west of Clemens. (It then reappears at Allen Street.) There is just a little stub end of Prospect that continues a short distance past the intersection, serving the single house to the south, a driveway to the north, and straight ahead… this.
I was very puzzled by this stark, concrete block building. What is it doing here? Who does it belong to? It looks out of place and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the house next to it or anything else on Prospect. I always wondered about it but never thought to try to figure it out until I started all this walking and blogging. That’s when I realized that it might belong to a house on the next street west, that is, Regent Street.
And so it does. I worked out that it belongs to a house on Regent Street and that the city has it accounted as a garage, built 1910, the same year as the house. But the supposed garage is bigger than the house, 1,660 square feet versus 1,120. Viewed from the house side, it appears that there is a normal (for the neighborhood) single-car garage with painted siding attached to it up front, which the city labels “shed” in their sketch of the property. The whole setup is very odd. There must be a story behind this.
This pair of stamps is on the west side of Jones Street between Kalamazoo and Hickory. Jones has one of those puzzlingly inconsistent sidewalks. The north half of this block has sidewalk only on the east side, but the south half has sidewalk on both sides. Then the sidewalk disappears again and never reappears; no other part of Jones has a sidewalk on this side. (The east side also loses its sidewalk south of Bement Street.)
The date of this stamp provides a possible clue as to how this happened. The sidewalk lines up exactly with the backyard of a duplex facing Hickory Street. That house was built in 1985, much later than most of the surrounding properties. I wonder if the city’s policy at the time was to require contractors to install sidewalks facing new residences.
Whatever its origin, it is a nearly pointless stretch of sidewalk. Anyone walking Jones Street is going to use the other side, where there is more consistent sidewalk. One of the side doors to the duplex connects to it, though in an awkwardly roundabout way: the side door walk connects to the driveway and the driveway to the sidewalk, but anyone coming out of the side of the house is probably just going to take the direct route across the lawn.
As for M & M Construction of Charlotte, I have been unable to find out anything about them, except that they don’t seem to be in business now.
This is the sidewalk block at the southeast corner of Parker Street and East Malcolm X Street. I’ll call it Parker since the house at this property faces Parker.
It’s of interest for two reasons. First, I have seen two stamps on one block before, but never three (driveways excepted). I think they were trying to make it clear which park of the sidewalk they were marking out, fearing the intersection would make it ambiguous whether they had paved Parker or Main (as it was then called). And speaking of Main, here is the other reason this spot is interesting. Look at the street sign that is at this corner.
Did they forget to change the sign when Main changed its name to Malcolm X in 2010? Or did this little stub end of the street somehow escape the official name change? I’ve been to this spot before when cataloguing the famous Schneeberger & Koort stamp, the one that brought the wonder of the Bum Walks Controversy into my life, but I did not notice the sign at the time.
This stamp is on the west side of Regent Street just about midway between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. It’s in front of the same house as this J. Wilson stamp. The house itself is a cute little Dutch colonial. A decade-plus ago, I had to have part of my chimney rebuilt, and the mason who did it lived in this house. He said, “You know I’ll do a good job because I’ll have to look at it.” In fact, he did do a really nice job.
The date appeared to be 1988 when I raked it with my flashlight beam, but now that I look at the photo it seems more like 1987. I will have to look at it in daylight next chance I get.
Nothing much to bring you tonight, so here’s another one of the usual Regent Street suspects, this one on the east side of the 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. It does occur to me that it’s odd that there are both 1987 and 1988 stamps from Cantu on the same blocks. I have been assuming that there was a big, mass sidewalk replacement project that Cantu got the contract for, and that it took them more than one year to do it. I would have thought they would do one block or street at a time, however, and that all the ones in one area would be the same year. Instead the ’87s and a couple of different styles of ’88s are intermixed.
This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Shepard and Allen, in front of Tannin. The “7” appears written on after stamping, though whether it is covering up an outdated number or is just reinforcing a number that didn’t print well, I can’t tell.
Tannin is an upscale Italian fusion restaurant, not the kind of place that appeals to me so I haven’t been there. It replaced the original location of a small local Mediterranean fast food chain called Tabooli, which was one of the go-to lunch spots for my husband and me. (Tabooli still has two other locations, but they aren’t as convenient for us.) Tabooli had opened in 2014 after renovating a former KFC. I was glad they did, because seeing that KFC inevitably made me think of the name that had gotten indelibly attached to it in my mind: “the Murder KFC.” In 2011 an employee was killed during an armed robbery. I’m not sure whether it ever opened again after the murder, but it had certainly been abandoned for some time before Tabooli moved in.
The building only dates to 1987 according to the city’s parcel records, but there was a KFC at that address at least as far back as 1968, per an advertisement in the State News (MSU’s student paper) on December 7. The only previous mention of that address that I can find is in a news brief in the August 18, 1955, [Lansing] State Journal:
$10 Stolen – Lansing police detectives are Investigating the burglary of the Pure Oil station at 1620 E. Michigan Ave. Wednesday evening. Detectives said the burglars gained entry through a window and stole $10 in coins from a vending machine.
Since the date of the stamp matches the construction date of the building, it seems possible that the sidewalk repair and the building’s construction were linked.
I bet you think this is the same stamp I did yesterday, since this one is also on the east side of Regent Street’s 400 block between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. Wrong! This one is… a couple of lots over. But you know this one is different because it’s next to my nemesis, the Super Bright Streetlight.
A few years ago, someone apparently ran a car into the old one that stood here and it broke into three pieces. It was lying on the yard next door for a little while before it was cleared away, and during that time I discovered that the globe is not, as I had always assumed, glass, but instead a surprisingly light piece of plastic that looks rather cheap up close. I felt the scales fall from my eyes and I have never looked at the street lamps in the city the same way again.
When they replaced it, the new one was worse in two ways. It never got painted white to match the other streetlights in the area. Instead it is just rust colored, and in fact the color seems to be authentic rust, although my father has the minority opinion that it’s actually primer. Every time I see it, I think of someone insulting a car in Grease: “What color is that, candy apple primer?”
The other way is that instead of the dimmer, yellow sodium appearance, it has been given an LED makeover and is now a bluish-white color, brighter than the sun. Note how it appears to be going supernova in my photo.
For a while I cursed the driver who subjected my block to this new lamp, but soon the LED issue will be moot, because they are planning to comprehensively replace all the lamps with LEDs in this neighborhood by 2022.