Most O & M stamps are undated and this one is not an exception. It’s on the northeast corner of Horton and Michigan, in front of the Gabriels Community Credit Union. It has a lamppost and a fire hydrant for company.
E. Michigan Ave., O & M, undated
Shepard St., Leavitt & Starck, 2021
Here’s a new one – both a new contractor for me and a new date. It’s on the west side of Shepard Street north of Kalamazoo, alongside the former Allen Neighborhood Center, which is currently transforming into a mixed use development called Allen Place.
Leavitt & Starck Excavating, Inc., is based in Ovid. It was founded in 2011 by Dean Leavitt and Tom Starck. They must be involved in the Allen Place project.
Clifford St., McNeilly Const., illegible date
This McNeilly stamp, on the east side of Clifford Street between Eureka and Prospect, is clearer than others I’ve seen, but only the name. The date, unfortunately, is illegible, at least until I get it in a more favorable light. It’s probably 1970s.
Larned St., DPW, 1926(?)
This neighborhood, down near the railroad tracks and I-496, is a short walk from my house, but I haven’t explored it thoroughly yet. I will probably correct that soon, since I’m getting a bit bored with my usual rambles. The neighborhood was developed by the Lansing Improvement Company and has many interesting old houses. Check out some old Lansing Improvement Company letterhead courtesy of the Capital Area District Library’s digital local history collection. There are some names you may recognize on there, including Edward W. Sparrow, Eugene Cooley, and one Horatio H. Larned.
This stamp is on the south side of Larned between Jones and Holmes. There is a stretch of sidewalk here, but no homes on this side of the street. Instead there is a park-like area behind which I-496 looms. I was surprised to find sidewalk here, since as I have noted, blocks or side of blocks with no houses commonly have no sidewalk. I deduced that this side of the street once had houses, and they were probably removed during the 496 project. Afterward I checked HistoricAerials.com and that confirmed my theory.
It’s surprising that the sidewalk was never removed in the intervening years, given how they have been tearing sidewalk out of the depopulated blocks of Urbandale. It doesn’t serve much purpose now. It stops suddenly before reaching any useful destination, and anyone actually trying to get somewhere on Larned will surely be walking on the other side, where the remaining houses are. For some reason they just never decided to pull it out, despite it being an orphaned vestige since the late 1960s. The most recent stamps on it are a pair of E.F. Sheets stamps from 1963. I expect they won’t bother repairing anything there again.
Shepard St., V.D. Minnis, undated
This worn V.D. Minnis stamp is on the west side of Shepard Street between Stanley Court and Kalamazoo. Unfortunately, like almost all V.D. Minnis stamps (here is a notable exception) it is undated.
Horton Ave., J.K. Spink, 1954
Today’s entry is a direct sequel to yesterday’s, as I decided to walk to the 200 block of Regent and check whether there were any Spink stamps in front of the former house of Douglas Spink, Jacob’s son. There were not, so I continued on across Michigan to Horton Avenue and revisited the stamp that originally spurred my research into Spink. The stamp is on the front walk of a house on the east side of the street between Jerome and Vine.
J.K. Spink died in 1952, and while it’s possible that the company carried his name for a while after that, I don’t see any ads like that in the 1950s Lansing State Journal. Instead I see ads from either Douglas Spink or just Spink Builders appearing by the time of this stamp. I wonder if Douglas just didn’t bother getting a new stamp for a while after taking over the business.
Regent St., J.K. Spink, undated
I had a stamp on Horton Street sitting on my back burner list for a while and decided to go out and get it today. It rained when I was first going to set out, so I decided to switch things around and do the research first, then get the photo later. I had written down “J.M. Spink” as the contractor’s name, but it turns out that I likely misread the worn stamp. Instead, I had probably seen the work of J.K. Spink, who was advertising in 1940s Lansing State Journal classifieds as a contractor and remodeling specialist.
As usual when I have a distinctive name to work with, Find A Grave was my friend. I found a Jacob Kent Spink buried in the Maple Grove Cemetery in Mason. (There is a photo of him as a young man at the memorial page there, if you want to get better acquainted.) From there I was able to search for his name in the LSJ and find his obituary, published July 21, 1952. According to that, Spink was a building contractor and World War I veteran. He was born in Toledo but grew up in Michigan, attending Mason High School and then the University of Michigan. Sadly, he was only 56 when he died. Of interest to me was noticing that he lived on the west side of the 300 block of Regent Street at the time of his death, and it was the same address that appeared in his business ads.
I did walk up to Horton Street where the stamp that originally spurred this research was located, but on a hunch I decided to pass his old house on the walk back. And this is what I found in the driveway, bumping my original planned stamp for today.
Spink’s son Douglas carried on in the contracting business, as I see advertisements in the 1950s for a contractor using either his name or “Spink Builders.” I discovered that Douglas also lived on Regent Street, on the 200 block. As I didn’t find this out until after my walk I didn’t know to go check for work there too, but I will put it on my ever-sprawling list of places to visit.
Eureka St., Carlson Const., 1977
This stamp is on the west side of Bingham Street between Michigan and Prospect, in front of the parking lot for the Pilgrim Congregational church. That’s where I vote now that Bingham (Street) School is gone.
This one is interesting because of its date. 1970s stamps are the least common decade I find (that is, from the 1920s on). There are a lot of 80s stamps, a fair few 60s stamps, but only a smattering of 70s stamps around the east side.
Unfortunately, this is one of those cases in which the contractor’s name is too common for me to narrow down who it is. I can’t find a history of a Carlson Construction company in metro Lansing, though there have been Carlsons in Benton Harbor, Byron Center, Otsego, and Saranac, the last being the closest.
Hall of Shame: Removed Sidewalk, S. Hayford Ave.
As threatened long ago and alluded to again recently, I am starting a new recurring feature, the Hall of Shame. My original conception of it was to point out newly-laid sidewalk that was out of compliance with marking requirements, but I am going to broaden it to include anything sidewalk-related I feel like disapproving of.
Lansing is much better with sidewalks than Lansing Township. In fact, one way to tell that you have wandered out of Lansing proper is that the sidewalks have vanished from under your feet. Nevertheless, Lansing still leaves something to be desired, in that the city seems to think that only blocks (or sides of blocks) that have houses on them strictly need sidewalks. Side streets that only have driveways on them usually have no sidewalks. I assume they were just never built there. That doesn’t surprise me, even if I don’t like it. What did surprise me was discovering, now that the snow is off the neighborhood and I can see it properly, that the city has actually been removing sidewalks from depopulated blocks.
The first example I ran across was the southern end of South Hayford Avenue. I’m not sure when the sidewalk was removed but the earth underneath still looks pretty fresh, and a photo in the city’s property records seems to show the sidewalk still present in June 2020. I’m sorry I didn’t know this was going to happen so I could have catalogued all the doomed sidewalk stamps. Speaking of stamps, here is the last one on the west side of the block, a very worn Cantu & Sons.
There are two more sidewalk blocks past this one, and then it ends abruptly, presumably at the edge of the property. Beyond it is the muddy ghost of the old sidewalk.
The obvious rationale for the sidewalk’s removal is that all the houses that were south of here have been demolished. There is now an urban farm there on the right. Hayford has a heavy concentration of them, making the street look almost rural. So why do I disapprove of removing the no-longer-needed sidewalk?
Because I reject the idea that only houses need sidewalks. This is still a public street, and anyone ought to have the right to walk down it for exercise, to amuse their dog, to admire the urban farms that the city wants us to take pride in, or for any other harmless reason. Tear down the houses if you must, but there should still be a public right-of-way.
Perhaps I’m too cynical, but removing the sidewalk strikes me as a gesture of subtle hostility toward the neighborhood. It is well known that the city would rather the Urbandale neighborhood not exist because of its susceptibility to floods and concentration of people of less means. Ever since the great Lansing flood of 1975, the city’s long-term plan for Urbandale has been to phase it out of existence, but efforts have been stepped up over the last decade or so. The city states that one of the goals of the Flood Mitigation Plan is to “keep neighborhoods strong and intact,” and yet it also states that “all property that is acquired is permanently deed restricted so that it cannot be developed again in the future.”
The city, the county, or the Garden Project own about half of the properties on the 700 block of Hayford. Most have been turned into farms or gardens, which is their favorite way of dealing with blight (although to my eyes it’s no more aesthetic to have a neighborhood full of sheds, barrels, and plastic-sheeted greenhouses than tired homes). A few are still standing, though that might mean they just haven’t gotten the funds for demolition yet, or maybe they’re waiting for the renters to move on voluntarily. Many properties eventually fall into the county’s Land Bank due to foreclosure. The city also has a program to buy properties directly, funded partly by a FEMA grant.
The east side of Hayford also has lost some of the end of its sidewalk. It’s a smaller amount, but more awkward, since it just cuts off after the last house’s front walk instead of continuing to the property line.
After taking these photos I walked to the end of Foster and found that it has even fewer remaining houses on its last block, and so an even larger amount of sidewalk has been recently removed.
Regent St., C. Gossett, 1963
Not much to say about this one; just continuing to plug away at eventually cataloguing the entirety of Regent Street. This presumed pair of C. Gossett stamps (I know it looks like “O” but elsewhere I have seen clear enough ones to know it’s “C”) is on the west side of the street.
