This is another one from my recent exploration of new sidewalks in the construction area on East Kalamazoo Street. These are going to start getting more interesting, I promise. (More interesting to anyone sufficiently interested in sidewalks and the east side of Lansing, anyway.) This one is at the southeast corner of Kalamazoo and South Howard Street, in front of the Amoco station.
What’s notable about this bit of pavement is that there didn’t used to be any sidewalk here. Past the gas station parking lot on Kalamazoo, there was just a bit of grass ending in a blind curb, and likewise on the other side of Howard. Strangely, despite being so hostile to pedestrians, there is a crosswalk signal here to allow crossing Howard. (I can’t recommend it. There’s no marked crosswalk and usually a lot of traffic turning onto Howard, which becomes a feeder lane for 127/496.) The newly-laid walk is a new curb cut, leading pedestrians across Howard. It remains to be seen whether they will do anything else to make this corner a bit more inviting to cross on foot.
This is across Mifflin Avenue from the one posted in the lasttwo entries. It’s on the southeast corner of Mifflin and East Kalamazoo Street, in other words, just outside the border of the city of Lansing, making it a rare example of a stamp in Lansing Township. As part of the recent construction on Kalamazoo, they have put in a new curb cut on this side with a single block of pavement. No further sidewalk has been laid yet and I am guessing it won’t be, since there wasn’t any there before, just a ramshackle parking lot that seems to belong to University Foreign Car across the street.
This is upside-down because I’m standing at the curb cut and looking east to show where the tiny bit of sidewalk ends.
This stake is actually back on the west side of Mifflin, but I photographed it to show that what I keep calling a “curb cut,” they apparently call a “sidewalk opening.”
Here’s a clipping I found that some helpful Newspapers.com subscriber has clipped from the May 6, 1970, State Journal. Titled “Children Endangered: Sidewalk Need Cited,” it reports on a discussion of the need for sidewalks on Brynford and Deerfield Avenues by the Lansing Township Trustees. “Trustees are concerned about a lack of sidewalks which forces children to walk in the two streets while going to and from classes at either Windermere Park Elementary or Waverly East Junior High,” according to the article. “A particular problem area, according to Frank Fitzgerald, township supervisor, is Brynford and W. Saginaw….”
I haven’t been to the blocks in question as far as I can remember, but a Google street view shows that there is no sidewalk anywhere on Deerfield Avenue. Brynford has no sidewalk on the Saginaw end, then a sidewalk suddenly picks up on the west side of the street for a while before disappearing again mid-block. Further south, a couple more disconnected bits of sidewalk briefly appear and disappear again. One of them traverses just a single lot, as though some past owner built it voluntarily and watched in disappointment as neighbors failed to follow suit.
This is all on brand for Lansing Township. While sidewalk coverage in the City of Lansing isn’t perfect, it is much more erratic in the Township. A fairly reliable way to tell that you have crossed into Lansing Township from Lansing is the disappearance of the sidewalk.
This is a minor curiosity that I noticed at the southeast corner of East Michigan and Mifflin Avenues, in front of the Muffler Man shop (which I have learned was a General Tire location from the 1950s through at least 1989). There is a length of sidewalk leading north to a curb cut, as though to allow pedestrians to cross Michigan.
What makes this curious is that there is no corresponding curb cut on the other side. The sidewalk across the road does not extend to the street. So it appears that the south side of the street was designed to allow someone to cross, but the north side was not.
I’m not sure how many people will find this as interesting as I do. What fascinates me about it is the way it reflects some series of decisions that must have made sense when they were made, and which depended on things that did not come to pass, or reflected conditions that have since altered. Alas, such historical minutiae are most likely unrecorded.
One possible influence on the situation is the fact that the south side, with the curb cut, belongs to Lansing Township, and the north side to Lansing. This doesn’t explain anything, exactly, but the correlation may be significant. It is out of character for Lansing Township to have more sidewalk than Lansing, but Lansing Township’s sidewalks (when they exist) are very erratic and inscrutable. The sidewalk starting at this corner and continuing east for a couple of blocks until it disappears is inset much further than the blocks to the west, and this again reflects the border, which divides Lansing from Lansing Township at Mifflin on this side of Michigan. This gives the buildings here an especially large lawn extension, deep enough that the late, lamented Theio’s had its outdoor seating on it. As a result, the stretch of sidewalk that leads to the curb cut is especially long and prominent, and must have been installed for a reason.
This pair of stamps is in front of the building that houses The People’s Kitchen on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Charles and Detroit. I previously covered a Hanneman stamp near these. The east side of the building is occupied by The People’s Kitchen; the west side currently houses JWR Health Services.
The eastern stamp. The Hanneman stamp is just out of frame below this, facing the other way.
The eastern stamp, and a pleasantly weathered bench.
The western stamp.
The western stamp in context, and JWR Health Services.
This one is in front of the vacant lot at the southwest corner of East Michigan Avenue and Charles Street, which puts it just outside the Lansing city limits in Lansing Township. It’s on the apron of one of the two driveways that used to lead into the parking lot of Theio’s diner.
Most people interested enough in Lansing to read this blog probably already know all about Theio’s, but for the sake of anyone else, it was a 24-hour diner that had been a neighborhood fixture since the 1960s. It was the only 24-hour diner in this part of town and for at least some part of my time in Lansing it might have been the only one, period. I was in there countless times, probably starting in 1999, when this stamp was still pretty new. My visits there spanned two husbands and several circles of friends. It was at its best in the earlier years, though there was an especially happy period for a few years in the 2010s when a crowd of people from the Lansing Pinball League would usually go there for conversation and hijinks after league got out.
In 2017 a new owner bought the place and it went very rapidly downhill. After a short time it was sold again, and things got even worse. The newest owner fired most of the longtime employees (and apparently forgot to get the social media passwords first, because their official Facebook page started to post angrily and entertainingly against the new ownership for a little while), the service got worse, and they started to cut back on offerings (one of the league folks tried to order a waffle and was told they had sold the waffle machine). At some point they turned around and sold it to yet another owner; Then the really unfortunate change happened: they quit being 24 hours and switched to serving breakfast and lunch only. A good chunk of their business came from the post-bar crowd and other night owls, so this was a bizarre move. Once that happened, it ended our pinball league after-parties and I never went there again. The end was very near at that point.
In March of 2018, Theio’s was condemned by the township building inspector for electrical issues. It never reopened. In October, the owner, probably encouraged by the real estate speculation that has been going on in this neighborhood, demolished the venerable restaurant and tried to put the land up for sale for something hilarious. I seem to recall it was listed for something laughably high, like $400,000, but don’t cite me on that. It’s not currently for sale as far as I can see, so it just sits there looking sad and reminding me of what I’m missing – what everyone around here is missing.
RIP Theio’s. Your coffee was as strong as a day-old kitten, but your French toast was faultless.
As a followup to yesterday’s entry, I decided to head around the corner past Dagwood’s and walk the blocks of South Howard Street. I knew that the sidewalk was incomprehensibly intermittent there, and thought it would be interesting to capture a stamp from this strange liminal zone.
Disappointingly, I didn’t find a single stamp until I just about got to the southwest corner of Michigan and Howard. The stamp is just south of the corner. So here you go: the only sidewalk stamp on South Howard is this S & N Contractors stamp from 2000.
The remarkable scarcity of stamps led me to wonder if Lansing Township lacks a sidewalk marking requirement. It would be in keeping with its slapdash approach to sidewalks. It turns out, however, that they do have a sidewalk marking requirement:
All concrete walks and approaches shall have the name of the contractor constructing the walk, together with the year same is constructed, stamped in the surface of the walk near each end thereof, and at least once in the surface of each approach.
I saw one short section of new-looking sidewalk on Howard that should therefore be in the Hall of Shame.
Facing northeast into the intersection of Michigan and Howard. The stamp is on the nearest sidewalk.
The property adjacent to this stamp is currently just a big, empty, somewhat overgrown parking lot. It’s owned by the bus company Indian Trails and they use it to park the Michigan Flyer airport bus, which seems like an underutilization of the space. Prior to becoming bus parking, it was a car lot, the name of which I can’t remember if I ever knew. Going further back, I see Lansing State Journal advertisements for the Lansing Overhead Door Company at that address. It was there at least as early as 1935 and as late as 1978. The first mention I can find of a new address for Overhead Door is in 1981, by which time they had moved to East M-78, and there they remain today.
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.
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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.
The curb cut faces southeast across the intersection. That’s the on-ramp to 127 and 496 up ahead. There is a bit of asphalt around and to the north of the curb cut, probably just some overlap from the parking lot, but no sidewalk.
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.
Another view to show that the curb cut absurdly points directly at the corner of the parking lot barrier.
And here’s Dagwood’s, in case you’re somehow not familiar. I’m standing on the curb cut and facing west while taking this.
This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Charles and Detroit, just outside the city limits of Lansing in Lansing Township. It’s in front of the building on the corner of Detroit Street that now houses the People’s Kitchen restaurant. The building was built in 1958 and for most of its existence it housed various offices. Prior to the building’s construction, the site was (of course) a Bud Kouts used car lot and before that it was Bill Otto Buick.
In 2017, a food truck called Street Kitchen moved in, which was started by a former co-owner of the (in)famous Old Town breakfast spot The Golden Harvest. In 2019 Street Kitchen remade itself as the People’s Kitchen, a full-fledged restaurant.
Facing the People’s Kitchen’s entrance. The stamp is facing away from the viewer, underneath (and facing) an arc-shaped Able Concrete stamp.
Hanneman is most likely Carl Hanneman, who started a concrete business in 1953 and then sold it to Mark A. Fineis in 1988. The business is still in existence today as Hanneman & Fineis. I wrote a little bit about them in a previous entry. This allows me to date the stamp between 1953 and 1988, which I admit is not narrowing it down much. I wonder if it was connected to the office building’s construction.
This is a first for this blog: this stamp is not within the city limits of Lansing. It is just barely inside the convoluted borders of Lansing Charter Township. More specifically, it is on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between the two US-127 overpasses, just east of Feldman Chevrolet. S & N Contractors stamps are present at intervals all the way under both overpasses. There must have been a big overpass construction project in 2000. I have a very vague memory of the freeway being closed for a stretch when I was new in town, so that lines up.
I believe that S & N Contractors is most likely the one that was once located on Lansing Road, with a Charlotte address but located closer to Dimondale. OpenCorporates gives their dissolution date as 2005. I notice that the State of Michigan Department of Transportation’s materials source guide dated March 2014 lists them as an approved supplier. I don’t know whether or not that means they were still around in some form by then. In any case, they no longer seem to be in business.
