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City Market Drive, Bearstone Construction, 2018

I took this photo when returning to the car after Silver Bells (Lansing’s annual holiday parade). The stamp is located inside the Lansing Center’s parking garage off City Market Drive.

I had previously and mistakenly believed that the Lansing Center was built in the 1950s. I think I had been confused by reading old newspapers that referenced a civic center in connection with popular midcentury mayor Ralph W. Crego. In fact, that was the Lansing Civic Center, which functioned mainly as a concert venue. It was renamed the Lansing Civic Arena in its later years to avoid confusion with the Lansing Center. The Lansing Center was only built in 1987, which is very surprising to me. That means when I came to town in 1999 it practically had a bit of new-development shine still on it. The Lansing Civic Arena was demolished in 1999. It had been at the southeast corner of Allegan and Pine Streets.

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N. Grand Ave., F & M Construction, 2010

I spotted this new-to-me contractor stamp while I was downtown to walk in the Turkey Trot 5K on Thanksgiving morning. It’s on the west side of North Grand Avenue next to Fire Station #1, which faces Shiawassee. There is a stamp on the driveway apron as well as the sidewalk.

The driveway apron stamp.

According to the city’s Web site about fire stations, Fire Station #1 was built in 1949 and extensively remodeled in 2006, which accounts for why it looks rather new. It is nicknamed “The Big House.”

The driveway apron in context in front of the fire station.

I can’t find out much about F & M Construction. Most likely they are F & M Concrete Construction, which I can find listings for placing them on Creyts Road in Dimondale. OpenCorporates shows that “F and M Concrete Construction LLC” of Dimondale only incorporated in 2013, but I would guess it is the same business responsible for this stamp.

This one is on the sidewalk.

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Fernwood Ave., DPW, 1925

I had thought I’d catalogued every 1920s stamp on the east side of Lansing, but I was wrong. I stumbled across this 1925 Lansing DPW stamp on the south side of Fernwood Avenue between Magnolia and Hayford.

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W. Michigan Ave., East Jordan Iron Works Sewer Grate

I walked the Silver Bells in the City 5K the morning after Silver Bells (Lansing’s annual holiday night parade) and afterward on the way back to my car I snapped this photo of a nice sewer grate – actually a storm drain, since Lansing did a huge project to separate their sanitary sewer from the stormwater drains around the time I moved to Lansing. I remember being unreasonably annoyed by it at the time, since it resulted in my closest bus stop being closed for a long time, and for a portion of that the second closest bus stop too, when I did most of my daily travel by bus. Also during that time the closest USPS mailbox to my house disappeared and was never put back when the construction was over. But, of course, I look back on it now and realize that my long walks were a small price to pay for the great environmental benefits of the sewer separation. I just wonder how people less able bodied than I, or with less free time to spend on walks, dealt with the loss of bus service.

I like the detailed fish (a trout, maybe) that serves to remind one of the harm done by dumping poison into the drain. There is also a small one at the bottom of the grate. This is the work of the East Jordan Iron Works, which you can read more about in a previous entry.

This drain is on the south side of West Michigan Avenue, at the southwest corner of Michigan and South Washington Square. I remember when this was just an intersection, but now it’s a traffic circle, and they put these giant ornaments (supplied by Bronner’s, the famed Christmas store in Frankenmuth) in the middle of it each year before Silver Bells.

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Marshall St., Bingham & Taylor water meter lid

I’ve already branched out into manhole covers, so why not wander further afield? Here is a water meter cover from Bingham & Taylor, a Virginia-based business that manufactures water and gas utility supplies.

It’s out in front of the Light Mission Pentecostal Church on the east side of Marshall Street between Jerome and the Armory.

The church was home to Unity of Greater Lansing from 1968 to 2012. The city’s online records don’t have the date it was built, but the parsonage next door (which was sold by Unity and is now just a private residence) was built in 1957 so I would guess a similar date for the church. It has a 1950s look to it, anyway.

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Horton Ave., DPW, undated (?)

Back in the Capital City now, on the west side of Horton Avenue between Jerome and the dead end, I found this worn, old Department of Public Works stamp. I’ve actually passed it many times before, but the waning light (oh, that early sunset, this time of year!) was raking everything at such a perfect angle that I thought I might be able to make out the illegible date this time.

Now that I have seen it in good light, I think the date marking there is actually a month, May, similar to this stamp nearby which is also labeled “May” with no apparent year. Strange.

It was a beautiful evening for looking at sidewalk markings, anyway. Look at this light.

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W. Preston St., Metropolitan Block bricks, Mt. Pleasant

This is another sidewalk-adjacent and Lansing-non-adjacent entry. There is a one-room schoolhouse, the Bohannon School, on the southwest corner of West Campus Drive and West Preston Street, close to the building where I work at Central Michigan University. I’ve seen it many times but never walked up to it, so on a recent walk I did. I was immediately charmed by the brick front walk, particularly the old-looking embossing on the bricks.

The front walk on the Preston side of the school.

The schoolhouse was built in 1901 but only moved here for restoration in 1970, so I’m not sure why the bricks look quite so old, unless they moved the bricks with it. A quick search lets me know that Metropolitan bricks are a favorite of brick enthusiasts. Here is an entry about them from a blog called Brickfrog (tagline: “All brick, all the time”). Sidewalk fan blog: meet brick fan blog. While this is my first foray into pictures of bricks, Brickfrog already has a few entries about sidewalk markers. Brickfrog’s sidewalk markers are from the Boston area, and are of a kind unknown in Lansing: metal plaques actually set into the concrete. I have seen pictures of these in a few big cities, but have never seen one myself.

A lot of the bricks have been swallowed by the grass over the years.

The Metropolitan Block Co. dates back to 1866 and produced a lot of the country’s street paving bricks starting in the 1890s. They were, and still are, in Canton, Ohio. They currently call themselves Metrobrick. Amusingly, they manufacture at least two different varieties of bricks that are pre-distressed in order to make them look old, an attempt to avoid the problem that brand-new bricks always look too perfect and thus fake.

A look at the schoolhouse from Preston.

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Watson Rd. (Mt. Pleasant), Michigan Consolidated Gas Co. manhole cover

This is nearby the sidewalk stamp featured in the previous blog entry, and was taken on the same walk near my work in Mount Pleasant. It’s on the west side of Watson Road between Preston and Crescent. It got my attention especially because my grandfather had a long and distinguished career with Michigan Consolidated Gas Company in Ann Arbor and Detroit.

As with the Bell System cover, this one bears a name no longer in use. MichCon, as it was commonly known, merged with DTE Energy (or as I knew it when I was young, Detroit Edison) in 2001, and in 2013 its name changed to DTE Gas.

Based on warning markings on it, the pipe seems to be a vent of some kind for the gas utility.
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Watson Rd. (Mt. Pleasant), Lakeshore Construction, 2019

With apologies to those who are here only for Lansing sidewalks, I have been dabbling in some Mount Pleasant sidewalk exploration because I have started taking my daily walks up at work some days. It’s been slim pickings, with very few stamps that I have found near work, mostly Eastlund Concrete. I was pleased to finally run across one for a contractor I haven’t seen before, Lakeshore Construction. The stamp is on the west side of Watson Road between Preston Street and Crescent Drive.

The stamp is a familiar style, a modular format seen in a lot of stamps from the last decade or so. I can tell that Lakeshore Construction is a contractor after my own heart. How do I know? Because their web site’s main image is a closeup of their stamp! The site describes them thusly:

Lakeshore Construction is a full service construction and concrete company specializing in stamped concrete, decorative walkways and patios, driveways, poured concrete walls and foundations. Lakeshore Construction started in 2016 servicing the Mid-Michigan area.

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N. Aurelius Rd., East Jordan Iron Works manhole cover

This manhole cover is in the sidewalk (if you can call that asphalt mess a sidewalk) that accompanies North Aurelius Road as it climbs over the railroad tracks. It’s on the west side of the street, roughly between Walsh and Perkins.

All over Michigan, when you see a manhole cover or a sewer grate, the odds are good that it will display the name of the East Jordan Iron Works. They were founded in 1883 as the Round and Malpass Foundry and made cast iron parts for the lumber industry, ships, machinery, agricultural equipment, and railroads. East Jordan is in the northwest of Michigan, so the connection with the lumber industry is unsurprising. In 1885 their name changed to the East Jordan Iron Works. Since 2012, they call themselves just plain “EJ,” which I find a little disappointing. Their corporate headquarters are still in East Jordan, but they are now a multinational company, having acquired a lot of other foundries over the years. In 2017 they built a new foundry after almost 135 years in their original location, which is amazing. Happily for the town, I’m sure, they built the new one just 14 miles away from the original.

EJ has a detailed company history and timeline on its Web site. I wish all companies did this.

The Potter-Walsh neighborhood can be seen to the west of the Aurelius overpass.