Horton St., unsigned, 1987

This mysterious stamp is on the east side of Horton Street between Jerome and the northern dead end. I can’t see anywhere that a name would have been stamped; it appears to be just a date. There is no paired stamp to explain it, either. The stamp is small and easy to overlook, almost hiding in the weeds.

Facing south on Horton. The stamp is right at the bottom of the nearest (full) block.

Vine St., Kegle Construction, 1987

I only found my first Kegle stamp pretty recently and yet I’ve already found another one. The style is very different, suggesting a different time period, but the first one was undated so I can’t be sure. This one is on the southeast corner of North Clemens Avenue and Vine Street, on the driveway of a house facing Clemens.

The leftmost stamp (facing the driveway). Each of the three blocks that comprise the driveway has one.

There are actually four of them: three on the driveway above the sidewalk, and one on what I call the driveway apron, between the sidewalk and the street. The date is hard or impossible to read on two of them, but fortunately it comes through as 1987 on the other two. This confirms that the company did survive the death of James F. Kegle in 1984 (something I wondered about in my previous Kegle entry).

The center stamp.
The rightmost stamp, and the one with the clearest date.
An overview of the house and driveway. Clemens is in view ahead.
This stamp is on the driveway apron below the sidewalk. The date can be seen here too.

Hall of Shame: Removed Sidewalk, S. Hayford Ave.

As threatened long ago and alluded to again recently, I am starting a new recurring feature, the Hall of Shame. My original conception of it was to point out newly-laid sidewalk that was out of compliance with marking requirements, but I am going to broaden it to include anything sidewalk-related I feel like disapproving of.

Lansing is much better with sidewalks than Lansing Township. In fact, one way to tell that you have wandered out of Lansing proper is that the sidewalks have vanished from under your feet. Nevertheless, Lansing still leaves something to be desired, in that the city seems to think that only blocks (or sides of blocks) that have houses on them strictly need sidewalks. Side streets that only have driveways on them usually have no sidewalks. I assume they were just never built there. That doesn’t surprise me, even if I don’t like it. What did surprise me was discovering, now that the snow is off the neighborhood and I can see it properly, that the city has actually been removing sidewalks from depopulated blocks.

The first example I ran across was the southern end of South Hayford Avenue. I’m not sure when the sidewalk was removed but the earth underneath still looks pretty fresh, and a photo in the city’s property records seems to show the sidewalk still present in June 2020. I’m sorry I didn’t know this was going to happen so I could have catalogued all the doomed sidewalk stamps. Speaking of stamps, here is the last one on the west side of the block, a very worn Cantu & Sons.

There are two more sidewalk blocks past this one, and then it ends abruptly, presumably at the edge of the property. Beyond it is the muddy ghost of the old sidewalk.

Looking south on South Hayford.

The obvious rationale for the sidewalk’s removal is that all the houses that were south of here have been demolished. There is now an urban farm there on the right. Hayford has a heavy concentration of them, making the street look almost rural. So why do I disapprove of removing the no-longer-needed sidewalk?

Because I reject the idea that only houses need sidewalks. This is still a public street, and anyone ought to have the right to walk down it for exercise, to amuse their dog, to admire the urban farms that the city wants us to take pride in, or for any other harmless reason. Tear down the houses if you must, but there should still be a public right-of-way.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but removing the sidewalk strikes me as a gesture of subtle hostility toward the neighborhood. It is well known that the city would rather the Urbandale neighborhood not exist because of its susceptibility to floods and concentration of people of less means. Ever since the great Lansing flood of 1975, the city’s long-term plan for Urbandale has been to phase it out of existence, but efforts have been stepped up over the last decade or so. The city states that one of the goals of the Flood Mitigation Plan is to “keep neighborhoods strong and intact,” and yet it also states that “all property that is acquired is permanently deed restricted so that it cannot be developed again in the future.”

Google Street View shows that the sidewalk used to extend to the end of this section of curb.

The city, the county, or the Garden Project own about half of the properties on the 700 block of Hayford. Most have been turned into farms or gardens, which is their favorite way of dealing with blight (although to my eyes it’s no more aesthetic to have a neighborhood full of sheds, barrels, and plastic-sheeted greenhouses than tired homes). A few are still standing, though that might mean they just haven’t gotten the funds for demolition yet, or maybe they’re waiting for the renters to move on voluntarily. Many properties eventually fall into the county’s Land Bank due to foreclosure. The city also has a program to buy properties directly, funded partly by a FEMA grant.

The sidewalk used to end at a driveway, which is why there is a curb cut here.

The east side of Hayford also has lost some of the end of its sidewalk. It’s a smaller amount, but more awkward, since it just cuts off after the last house’s front walk instead of continuing to the property line.

The truncated sidewalk on the east side of the street.

After taking these photos I walked to the end of Foster and found that it has even fewer remaining houses on its last block, and so an even larger amount of sidewalk has been recently removed.

S. Hayford Ave., Cantu & Sons, 1987

What’s that? You were hoping for something more exciting? Tough. You’ll take this Cantu & Sons stamp and you’ll like it.

It’s on the west side of South Hayford Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.

Looking south on Hayford. And yes, those are some “Christmas” lights on a house down the street!

S. Clemens Ave., BWL, 1987

Here’s an unusual BWL (Board of Water and Light, or so I assume) variation on the west side of South Clemens Avenue between Prospect and Kalamazoo. The rounded, almost handwritten-looking font of other BWL stamps is replaced by smaller, typewriter-like letters. There also seem to be periods this time. One thing that hasn’t changed is the unique BWL custom of stamping the name in one corner and the date in the other.

I initially thought the date was 1997, but when I got down to look at it more closely it appeared to be 1987 as the bottom loop of that third number appears to come all the way up. It’s pretty hard to tell the 8 from the 9 in this font (a recurring problem with sidewalk stamps that use nearly symmetrical rounded numbers) but I am tentatively sticking with 8. If you think I’m wrong I’d be happy to hear another opinion.

Closeup of the date. I had to scrape some dirt off to get the last number.
Looking north on South Clemens.

S. Fairview Ave., Cantu & Sons, 1988

You’re probably thinking I’m about to say that due to the snow today and recently, I could only find this one stamp. But no: I probably saw at least a dozen stamps on my walk – not very many, but still enough for a reasonable selection, right?

Wrong. Every one I saw was a Cantu & Sons. And that’s really just how common they are, that a dozen random stamps on the east side have a good chance of all being theirs. Here’s one from the west side of South Fairview Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.

It’s a little hard to read, but this is one of the many stamps where they have ad hoc changed the 1987 date stamp to 1988 by drawing an 8 in.
The stamp is somewhere in that cleared stretch. You can see what I had to work with today.

S. Hayford Ave., Cantu & Sons, 1987

This very worn Cantu & Sons stamp is on the east side of South Hayford Avenue just south of Prospect Street. Look, you try finding something more exciting when it dumped eight inches of snow overnight. I was ready to kiss the ground in gratitude every time I got to a cleared sidewalk.

All that snow is very pretty, though.

Looking north on South Hayford. On the right you can see where I set down the bag of Quality Dairy paçzki I had just bought.
This is probably the paired stamp, a bit south of the one above.

S. Foster Ave., Cantu & Sons, 1987

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Look, at least it’s the less common variation, right? It’s on the east side of South Foster Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.

Right now this blog is less a sidewalk stamp blog and more a hall of fame of people who actually keep their sidewalks clear. Well, maybe the groundhog won’t see her shadow tomorrow.

Oh yeah baby, look at that sexy, snow-free sidewalk. I’m lucky I didn’t turn into a Tex Avery wolf when I laid eyes on it.

E. Kalamazoo St., Cantu & Sons, 1987

I know, I know, it’s a plain old Cantu & Sons 1987. They’re everywhere. I can’t help it; there was a dusting of snow over almost everything and I got desperate and took something I could actually see, if barely. There is a pair of them in front of StateSide Wellness, on the south side of East Kalamazoo Street between Regent and Clemens. They are very worn, almost certainly due to being next to the building’s driveway.

A very, very worn stamp. This is the eastern of the two.

I’m still not quite used to the place being a marijuana dispensary, as it recently remade itself. When I moved to town, it had been Lucky’s Market, a convenience store. I thought it was nice having a shop close by my house in case I ran out of pop, though it was pretty disorderly inside, had an off-kilter selection, and took only cash. I gathered that it had a bit of a reputation on the east side. Someone in my pinball league once said to me, “You know, they used to sell little balls of steel wool there for a dime each.” My husband likes to say that it became much more reputable as a pot shop than it was as a convenience store. I will admit that it looks neater and does a better job shoveling its sidewalk.

This is the western of the pair. Sorry it’s not a better photo, but I had to take it in a hurry as I was in the way of traffic. The place was positively jumping. They have a recreational permit now too, so…

Another longtime resident told me that she remembered when it had been a fried chicken place. She said people used to like to get their fried chicken there and then eat it while doing laundry next door. (The place next door is now a convenience store – for a long time there were two of them side by side taking up that side of the block – but had been a coin laundry before I moved to town.) I looked into it, and it appears it was one of several Lansing locations of Famous Recipe Chicken (sometimes called Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken). It seems to have been that from around 1966 to 1991, so during the era of these stamps. After that, it seems to have been something called Steak 2 U for a while before becoming Lucky’s in 1994.

It’s a far less sketchy looking building now, but it sure is drab as heck, with that dark gray, corrugated siding.

The building was built in 1956. While Lucky’s was shedding its old cladding and plastic roof trim (during the transformation to StateSide Wellness) we got a chance to see the building naked. It was a surprisingly tiny pillbox of a building made of concrete block. This revealed bricked-over remnants of garage bay doors, suggesting an early existence as a service station.

E. Kalamazoo St., Don Bates, 1987

There are two of these stamps in front of the apartments across from Hunter Park, on the north side of East Kalamazoo Street between Holmes and Clifford. Although I pass those apartments all the time, I would not have been able to tell you what the complex was called until I looked it up this evening. Apparently they are the Beverly Place Apartments.

Both stamps are pretty worn. On one of them the name is harder to read but the date is clear. On the other, the name is fairly clear but the last digit of the date is illegible. Putting them together, I get Don Bates, 1987.

The stamp in the top photograph is located in the nearest almost-full slab in this one..

I haven’t found out anything about Don Bates. I will say I am surprised to see a 1987 stamp from someone besides Cantu & Sons (and there is at least one Cantu stamp on this block).

This stamp is a little way east of the one above.