As noted yesterday, I picked a block more or less randomly to stop at on my way home from work, and I ended up on Downer Street between Woodruff and Hopkins. There was disappointingly little of interest; yesterday’s mysterious driveway stamp is the best of it. The newest stamps on the block, from Eastlund Concrete, are from a section of sidewalk wrapping around the southwest corner of Downer and Hopkins.
Continuing my brief tour of the 800 block of Call Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues: this stamp is from the south side of the block. Eastlund Concrete stamps are common enough, but it’s the misprint of the date that got my attention.
I live in Lansing but work in Mount Pleasant. I’ve digressed from metro Lansing before to post some stamps from Albion, where my parents live, but haven’t done any from Mount Pleasant. So, while taking my lunch break walk today, I decided to see what I could find.
I walked probably a mile along South Washington Street before I finally found any stamps at all. I am going to assume Mount Pleasant has no ordinance requiring sidewalk stamping. I did eventually find a pair of stamps bookending a long stretch on the east side of Washington between Gaylord and May. Eastlund Concrete gets around: they are also one of the only stamps I have been able to find near my parents’ house in Albion, as well as showing up frequently in Lansing. They’re based in Holt, south of Lansing, making Mt. Pleasant a pretty good hike for them. They evidently are also pretty consistent stampers, since it appears that stamping sidewalks is uncommon in both Albion and Mount Pleasant.
This is my new earliest Eastlund Concrete stamp. It’s on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Ferguson and Holmes.
This building was constructed in 1972, according to the city parcel records. It was a Goodyear service center which had its grand opening in March 1973, and closed sometime in the 2010s. It has stood there looking sad ever since. In 2019 the building was sold to the expanding chicken heart known as Sparrow. I don’t know what they are doing with it. It appears to have some miscellaneous junk stored in the service bays, and the windows on the retail side are covered up.
This is the earliest dated Eastlund stamp I have found, though in style it closely resembles an undated stamp I collected in front of Papa John’s. It’s on the north side of Lasalle Boulevard. Lasalle Boulevard is a strange street that has two entirely disconnected parts, one north of Lasalle Gardens and the other south of Lasalle Gardens; this is on the southern leg, in front of the last house before the street takes a dramatic curve to the south.
This stamp represents an Eastlund Concrete variation I had not yet recorded. Among the several stamps they have used, it’s the only one that gives their city. It’s on a bit of walk between the sidewalk and the street – what I have taken to calling a “curb walk” since I don’t know the real name for it – on the north side of Prospect Street between Bingham and Jones.
The walk – which has seen better days – is unusually long for the breed. This is because of something interesting I have observed in the Prospect Place neighborhood, though I don’t know the significance of it: the sidewalks are inset quite a bit further from the road compared with other east side neighborhoods. This gives the lawns much bigger than usual “extensions.”
“Extension,” I must explain, is the name I have always used for the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street. That’s what my parents called it, so that’s what I called it, and still do. Eventually, though, I noticed that other people didn’t call it that. I’ve heard it called all kinds of things by people from different regions, but seemingly never “the extension.” I began to wonder if it was idiosyncratic to my family, until I discovered the Wikipedia article on (as they call them) road verges. The article contains a list of some examples of regional names for road verges, and among them is “extension lawn,” claimed to be specific to Ann Arbor, Michigan (citation needed). I grew up in Ann Arbor. That said, I never heard “extension lawn,” just plain “extension.” I did a bit more poking around and discovered that Ann Arbor’s municipal code in fact uses the name “lawn extension” (not “extension lawn,” Wikipedia) for it. One thing I do remember from my youth in Ann Arbor is that the extension is a frequent cause of fights between the city and homeowners over whether anything can be planted there besides grass.
Lansing’s municipal code has its own name for this piece of land: “parkway.” I don’t think I have ever heard a Lansingite use that in conversation. I think the most common name for it here is “the-right-of-way,” which is correct but not specific: as the terms are used in the city code, the parkway as a right-of-way, but not all right-of-ways are parkways. The code also makes clear that “No plant, shrub or tree shall be planted or allowed to grow in the right-of-way unless authorized by the Director of Public Service” (1020.03, “Maintenance of Parkways”). In stark contrast to Ann Arbor, I see no evidence this rule is ever enforced. It’s nearly as common to see violation of it as compliance.
This one is on my list of mysteries and oddities. It’s a curb cut at the northwest corner of East Kalamazoo and South Howard Streets, next to the parking lot for Dagwood’s Tavern, and it has no reason to exist.
Kalamazoo has no sidewalk at this point; its sidewalk mostly disappears after it crosses into the wilds of Lansing Township. The sidewalk on Howard appears and disappears with no discernible pattern, but at this point there is also none. So the curb cut is out there on its own, facing the busy intersection of Kalamazoo and Howard. It doesn’t even give access to Dagwood’s parking lot, since the corner of the lot has a metal barrier directly adjoining the curb cut.
It would make sense, I suppose, for a curb cut to be installed (perhaps while doing other work on the curb or road nearby) if it was part of an intention to someday get around to putting in a sidewalk. But there just isn’t somewhere for a sidewalk to go, not unless Lansing Township makes Dagwood’s give up part of their parking lot. And to the best of my recollection, the barrier at the edge of the lot has always been there as long as I’ve been going to Dagwood’s, which means it pre-dates the curb cut.
This stamp is actually on the grounds of Eastern High School, on a curb cut in front of the school. There are lots of similar ones on the walks around the school as well as on the public sidewalks on Marshall Street and East Saginaw Street. They must date to when the school was built.
The building was constructed to house Pattengill Middle School, which became a “biotechnical” magnet school called Pattengill Academy when it moved there in 2007. It had previously been located on Jerome Street next to Eastern High School, but like so much of that neighborhood it ended up in the hands of Sparrow and was demolished to build a parking lot. Its original name when it opened in 1921 was East Junior High, but the following year it was renamed Pattengill Junior High.
Pattengill closed in 2013. Meanwhile, the original (1928) Eastern High School got sold to (guess who?) Sparrow, so in 2019, Eastern High School was moved into the former Pattengill building.
I took time out from visiting family in Albion for Easter to take a walk in and around Victory Park. I know from past experience that stamps are much rarer in Albion than in Lansing, suggesting they are not required by ordinance there. Most of the ones I found were Miller’s Cement, the same one I found during my Christmas visit. I found one other, on the curb cut leading from the east side of South Ionia Street south over West Oak Street. It’s our old friend Eastlund Concrete, a familiar sight in Lansing.
There’s a vacant lot here now, though Google’s street view shows a house here as recently as 2012. They cut the trees in front of it down too, more’s the pity.
This stamp is on the west side of Rumsey Avenue just north of Michigan, next to the Church of the Resurrection complex and amidst several E.R. Premoe stamps that have been featured before.
The date is a bit jumbled but I believe it to be 1990, due to its similarity to a 1990 Eastlund stamp that I have seen on Kalamazoo near Leslie.
