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Work begins on E. Kalamazoo St.

The work they were getting ready for on the 1700-1800 blocks of East Kalamazoo Street – as discussed in my last entry – and as I predicted, they have started tearing out chunks of sidewalk. I’ll have to check again in daylight, but I believe that this stretch, located outside the former Lucky’s (later Pure Options, now vacant), took out a pair of Cantu & Sons 1987 stamps.

That’s no great loss, I suppose, given how common those stamps are on the east side, but it did cause me to comment to my husband about how the stamps I catalog here are “ephemeral.” Then I corrected myself, “Actually, I guess they’re not all that ephemeral,” and he laughed and agreed. We were both thinking of how old many of them are; it’s quite common to find ones from the 1920s, and not all that hard to find ones that are earlier, as I soon found out when I started making an effort to record them. Still, I suppose what I meant is that any of them could be gone at any time, and there’s no predicting when. That’s why I’m glad I have made an effort to photograph so many.

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N. Clemens Ave., Eastlund Concrete, 2023

A well-placed streetlight allowed me to see this, my first 2023 stamp, during my walk earlier tonight. It’s on the west side of North Clemens Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw, and it’s from reliable stampers Eastlund Concrete. But what’s this?

Loyal blog readers (hi, dear) will recall that there are many Cantu & Sons stamps in the neighborhood that bear a 1988 date that is actually a 1987 stamp with a line added to the 7 to correct it. Eastlund saw this and said, “Too neat. Hold my beer.” With no easy way to turn a 2022 stamp into ’23, they evidently just scraped out the last digit before rewriting it by hand. Eastlund, look, I love you guys. You’ve had a variety of different stamps over the years and you use them. These are endearing traits, to a sidewalk stamp blogger. So it’s with affection that I say, c’mon, this is sloppy.

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Rumsey Ave., Bowden Const., undated

I found this very plain stamp on a front walk on the west side of Rumsey Avenue between Michigan and Jerome. Unfortunately, it’s undated. I think there may be some other Bowden marks on driveways nearby so I need to return to the area and see if I can find a dated one next time.

This is my first Bowden stamp, and I can’t seem to figure out who that is. I can find evidence of a Bowden Construction in Mason, but they seem to be a roofing contractor, so that doesn’t really make sense.

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N. Foster Ave., Louis Guinette, 1928

I’m kicking off the fourth year of the blog in style, with a brand new stamp, and a beautiful one. Just look at that clear impression and the artistic vignette effect! I just stumbled across this yesterday on someone’s driveway on west side of North Foster Avenue between Michigan and Vine, which is a block I walk all the time.

Every time I decide that I must have found every unique stamp on the east side something like this happens.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything out about Louis Guinette. Searching for his name gets me no hits in the State Journal, and Find a Grave doesn’t even know of a grave anywhere in Michigan for someone named Louis Guinette.

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Jerome St., DPW, 1930s(?)

I found this very worn and craggy Lansing DPW stamp on Jerome Street, near the northeast corner of Jerome and Ferguson. The date is impossible to be certain about but it looks to me like something in the 1930s, possibley 1939, which is consistent with it being what I call a “second style” DPW stamp.

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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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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…