I walked on the southern blocks of South Francis Avenue for the first time in a while and discovered, to my surprise, that a fair bit of sidewalk work had been done recently, all of it by White Hawk (who also did a lot of work on South Magnolia recently). Here is a representative example, which happens to be in front of a house I like, on the west side of the street. It would be at the northwest corner of Francis and Harton if Harton hadn’t been vacated at this point.
I like a couple of things about this property. One is the pleasant yard. It doesn’t look like much in the gray late winter, but it has nice shrubs and flowers, lawn ornaments, and a tidy split-rail fence. The other is the house itself, built (surprisingly) in 1942. It’s a small, boxy house, like many on the street, but it has been given just enough little details to lift it above its peers. It has shutters and trim details, and my favorite part, Tudor-like timbers on the sides of the attic level that give it a storybook flair. Its current paint job even has them in a contrasting color. It’s neat.
I wish the timber details were easier to see in the photo, but they’re obscured by the shrub.
Here’s a new(ish) Eastlund Concrete stamp from the house on the corner of southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street. The house faces Magnolia, but this particular stamp is on Marcus. It looks like in addition to some sidewalk, Eastlund also redid part of the diagonal front walk. I like the way it heads for the corner instead of aiming straight forward to Magnolia. I’ve admired this house for a while because of the interesting multiple cladding on the front facade.
Checking the Belon Real Estate Collection at the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection, I find that the house was built in 1946. A photo of it in 1958 shows it in what I assume was its original paint scheme, with the second floor painted a much darker shade than the first, which adds even more interest to its face; it’s a shame more recent owners have painted it all the same color. Still, it is an attractive house marred by deferred maintenance, unsurprising since it is landlord-owned.
I managed to find a contractor stamp I hadn’t done yet! I actually cost myself a bit of time on a virtual 5K I was doing to get the photo. This is from the south side of East Michigan Avenue just west of the railroad tracks near Hill Street. It’s outside the Block600 mixed-use development that includes Meijer’s Capital City Market and the Courtyard by Marriott and probably came about as a result of that construction.
Cascade Cement Contracting is, as the stamp says, based in Caledonia, which is a suburb of Grand Rapids. According to their Web site, they were founded in 1972 by a pair of brothers who had emigrated from the Netherlands in the 1960s.
Continuing my walk near the Meridian Mall, I found another new-to-me contractor stamp. This one is in front of Buddy’s Pizza on the north side of Grand River Avenue, a short distance west of the mall entrance.
Merlo Construction is based on Milford, which is pretty far afield from Meridian Township, so I assume a pretty big project brought them here. According to the About page on their Web site, the business was founded by Perry and Ray Merlo in 1991.
The stamp isn’t visible here. It is out of frame below the right side of the photo.
I have to issue a partial retraction to my Hall of Shame entry on the Allen Place project (on the north side of East Kalamazoo Street between Shepard and Allen). I had believed that no sidewalk marking was left anywhere on the Kalamazoo side of the building when the new sidewalk was laid. Recently, however, I discovered that there is one solitary stamp in the expanse, located not in the main sidewalk path but on the pavement next to the curb, oddly facing the curb instead of the building. The stamp is, in fact, right in the area that I saw being installed and photographed for a previous entry.
Let’s say I will put an asterisk by the Hall of Shame entry. I still think there should be more stamps for a project this big. By convention, stamps are placed at the start and end of a run of new sidewalk, though that is not required in Lansing (the code here merely says they must stamp wherever they are directed to by the Director of Public Works).
Yes, I know. MacKenzie Co. 2022 is the new Cantu & Sons 1987. Don’t worry, I’m almost done with the new construction. This is a new curb cut at the southwest corner of East Kalamazoo and Charles Streets. There is a corresponding new one on the other side of Charles.
Previously, there were no curb cuts or any sidewalk here, just parking lots for Gerber Collision and NAPA. The Gerber lot, which is the one pictured here, had parking barriers at the edge of it, then a grassy strip, then a curb, so it was not pedestrian friendly. Good for whomever decided that should be changed. It does appear to have cost Gerber a little bit of their parking lot.
I owe an apology to Lansing Township, or at least to whomever is behind all the sidewalk work that is going on in the construction zone on Kalamazoo between Francis and Howard. I wrote with great disapproval (and the deployment of a brand new tag, wtf) about the apparent decision to stop short of joining the new sidewalk up with existing sidewalk on the other side of an unpaved driveway, just north of Dagwood’s parking lot on Howard Street.
The grassy remnant of a driveway on the west side of Howard marks the former site of a house, a very small house in a style typical of the neighborhood, probably built in 1910, if I’m reading the property records right. By the time it was demolished (I think it was last year, or thereabouts) It was in decline so long that my ex-husband and I used to refer to it as “The Scariest House in Lansing,” and we split up in 2007. This is actually a misnomer for two reasons: there are much spookier houses around town, and it’s not in Lansing (this is Lansing Township, remember). We just saw it so often coming and going to the freeway or visiting Dagwood’s that its long, slow deterioration was hard to miss. At one point, Dagwood’s put up a new fence along that edge of the property, and we joked about a dive bar having to put up a fence to block the view of the neighbors rather than the other way around.
Anyway, the poor sad house is gone now. But what’s this?
I went back there last night and I must eat my words, or at least the letters WTF: they have laid sidewalk across the gap, and actually a bit past it, I guess replacing some degraded walk in front of the vacant lot. The sidewalk now stretches unbroken until… the edge of the last lot before Prospect Street. In other words, there is still a strange gap in the sidewalk, leaving just one house of this block of Howard without a front sidewalk. I could understand it if the house faced Prospect, but it faces Howard. I suppose they decided it was outside the scope of this project.
Another interesting note is that they have dug out the area where the curb cut for the old driveway is, suggesting it will receive a proper driveway apron next, even if there is no house for it to serve and it seems unlikely there will be anytime soon. There is actually another house on this same lot, but it’s a bizarre situation. The other house is strangely featureless and looks more like a shed than a house. According to Lansing Township’s property records online it is 480 square feet – which I believe – and was built in 1910 – which I am more skeptical of. It seems to have been maintained reasonably well even as the house up front was left rotting for years. It used to be completely hidden behind the main house and so I didn’t even know it existed until I started poking around the property records. The new driveway probably isn’t there to serve this second house, since access to that one seems to be via an alley behind Dagwood’s.
Yes, I’m still mining the construction area on the east end of Kalamazoo, in Lansing Township. This new sidewalk is in front of the former East Side Foreign Car building on the south side of East Kalamazoo Street between Charles and Detroit Streets. Previously, there was none here, just a thin strip of lawn in front of a white picket fence.
This stamp is at the curb, facing toward the road.
A look at the bus stop, currently closed due to the construction.
In addition to the new sidewalk, they have installed a concrete area at the curb (what I have sometimes referred to as a “curb walk” since I don’t know a proper name for it) for people to stand on while waiting at the bus stop. Previously, people waiting for the bus would have to stand on the little strip of grass in front of the curb. This is a much more hospitable bus stop.
The new sidewalk continuing east past the old East Side Foreign Car building. There was no sidewalk here before.
This particular stretch is unsigned, but it’s part of the construction on East Kalamazoo Street that I’ve been cataloguing for the last several blog entries, which is peppered with plenty of MacKenzie 2022 stamps. On my previous foray into the area, I had noticed that they appeared to be preparing to lay sidewalk in front of Dagwood’s. When I returned, I was eager to see how that had developed.
The new sidewalk at the edge of Dagwood’s parking lot.
Previously, the sidewalk on this, the north, side of Kalamazoo had petered out in front of a house a little west of Detroit Street. A well-trodden path across the grass led the rest of the way east to Dagwood’s. In front of Dagwood’s, there was (and still is) a little stone wall, presumably to stop drunks from stumbling straight out the front door into the street. To pass by Dagwood’s on foot, one would have to walk up a couple of shallow steps onto the bar’s little front porch and down the other side. Then, on the other side, one would be in the Dagwood’s parking lot, which was separated from the curb with a metal guard rail. From the position of the steps, my guess is that the wall was a later addition.
I previously wrote about the fact that a curb cut had been made at the corner of Dagwood’s parking lot, meaning the corner of Kalamazoo and Howard, despite the fact that it made no sense because it pointed straight at a guard rail. I wondered at the time whether it was there in case they ever installed a sidewalk in the future.
The curb cut at the northwest corner of Kalamazoo and Howard.
The big news here is that they have put in sidewalk in front of Dagwood’s, both on the side as noted previously, and now in the front too. The guard rail is temporarily gone, but when it returns it will have to be further from the road than it was before, meaning that Dagwood’s has apparently been obliged to give up a bit of its parking lot. The curb cut is now much larger and has a traction plate. The previous one had been installed in vain, since it’s gone now that there’s actually a sidewalk to use it with.
The new approach to Dagwood’s.
Perhaps the biggest change is that the steps in front of Dagwood’s have been removed, at least as far as passing traffic is concerned. There is still a small step up into the bar from the porch area, but the steps that passersby had to traverse are gone.
A closer look at the area in front of Dagwood’s, showing where the step used to be.
I am genuinely impressed that this stretch of Kalamazoo is getting so much sidewalk work done, and doubly so that they were clearly thinking about accessibility and safety in this case.
A few days after the last batch, I walked through the construction area on East Kalamazoo Street again to see how things had developed. This short stretch of walk on the north side of Kalamazoo between Detroit and Howard lacks a stamp, but it is part of the work being done by MacKenzie Co.
What’s interesting to me about this spot is the little jog in the walk. This is one of the intermittent areas in the Lansing Township stretch of Kalamazoo that did already have sidewalk. The stretch of walk in front of the the two buildings here hugs both buildings, but as the building to the east is further forward on its lot, the sidewalk jumps abruptly a few feet on either side of the driveway. What has changed is that it now follows a defined curving path through the driveway. I’m not sure that there’s any functional difference – nothing stopped one from walking across the driveway before – but I greatly appreciate the aesthetic improvement and I’m impressed that they bothered.
