Eastlund seems to have been erratic about stamping the date. This one is on the east side of Lathrop Street just north of the corner of Lathrop and Elizabeth.
I realize now that I have actually done the paired stamp to this one before, the one around the corner on Elizabeth, but this is what I have and this is what you’re getting. If you look at the previous post, you can see the corner by day instead.
This stamp, found on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Clifford and Lathrop, has many twins along this stretch. I took a photo of it mainly to showcase the sad, abandoned storefront it’s in front of.
The City Pulse made this building its Eyesore of the Week on August 29, 2019, writing, “The storefront housed Rapid Printing, Rapid Publications & Advertising and finally Michigan Avenue Printing. Its last Facebook post dates from January 2014 and the business seems to have collected dust since then, with printing equipment visible from the window.” I’m not entirely sure it did close in 2014. The evidence is ambiguous: the building sold in 2014 to its current owner, but a Google street view from August 2015 shows a seemingly lit “OPEN” sign in the front window, though the sign over the awning is gone. It is definitely gone by the time of the next street view picture in August 2016.
A [Lansing] State Journal clipping from December 13, 1935, shows an advertisement for Trilby bath soap which reveals that the address was currently an A&P. In the early 1970s it was apparently an upholstery shop.
The front windows are uncovered for anyone to peer in, and it’s a bizarre sight. A copy machine is still sitting in there along with other office equipment, and a bulletin board just inside the window has faded business cards and advertisements. There is a desiccated potted plant just inside the door that can be made out, already dead, in the August 2015 street view images.
This graffiti on the east side of North Fairview Avenue between Saginaw and Grand River got my attention because of the lettering style. Most sidewalk graffiti is just plain lines. This one’s hollow block lettering is unique and ostentatious. The grass clippings from a recently mown lawn were giving it a little extra definition.
I didn’t notice the + at first and thought it was just four letters, TKSD, but when I looked at my photo later I realized it was a declaration of love: “TK + SD.”
My eyes are always drawn to an old Department of Public Works stamp, no matter what kind of shape it’s in. This one is on the east side of North Fairview Avenue between Saginaw and Grand River. I’m fairly sure it is 1920s, but can’t read the last digit. My gut says 1925, but I’m by no means confident about that.
The stamp may be nothing too special, but it does represent a breakthrough: I finally made myself walk across the pedestrian bridge over Saginaw. Many years ago when I was in grad school I ended up in this neighborhood for reasons I can’t recall or guess at. What I do remember is that I tried to cross on the pedestrian overpass and though I was able to walk to the top, my legs went weak and locked up and would not let me cross. I’m afraid of heights, and it feels flimsy, but mostly it’s the traffic roaring underneath that terrifies me. It doesn’t help that when I was buying my house, the real estate agent drove us underneath one of them and commented about how there was an accident when a truck hit one and knocked it down while some children were on it. (I thought I remembered him saying someone was killed, but either I misremembered or he did. Six children were injured, however.) I ended up descending the steps again in defeat and walking to a traffic light to cross. This time, though, I walked across it at last, and did it again on the way back. I was given some practice by having to walk across a larger one over a busier road in Mexico City a few years ago.
Looking south on Fairview. The stamp is on the block in front of the street tree, but facing the other way.
In case you thought this blog had strayed too far from its roots, here’s a Cantu & Sons 1988 stamp. I can tell this the faded date is 1988 mainly because I can see the extra line they were in the habit of putting in to change the 7 to an 8 before they finally got around to getting a 1988 stamp. The stamp is in front of the only house that faces the 1900 block of Prospect Street. It’s on the south side of Prospect Street west of Clemens.
When I was new in town I very often had to walk home from the bus stop at Michigan and Clemens, usually by walking south on Clemens and then west on Kalamazoo. This walk got so dull from repetition that I wished I could vary it, and was disappointed by the abrupt disappearance of Prospect west of Clemens. (It then reappears at Allen Street.) There is just a little stub end of Prospect that continues a short distance past the intersection, serving the single house to the south, a driveway to the north, and straight ahead… this.
I was very puzzled by this stark, concrete block building. What is it doing here? Who does it belong to? It looks out of place and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the house next to it or anything else on Prospect. I always wondered about it but never thought to try to figure it out until I started all this walking and blogging. That’s when I realized that it might belong to a house on the next street west, that is, Regent Street.
And so it does. I worked out that it belongs to a house on Regent Street and that the city has it accounted as a garage, built 1910, the same year as the house. But the supposed garage is bigger than the house, 1,660 square feet versus 1,120. Viewed from the house side, it appears that there is a normal (for the neighborhood) single-car garage with painted siding attached to it up front, which the city labels “shed” in their sketch of the property. The whole setup is very odd. There must be a story behind this.
Very shortly after I started this blog, I was wondering how long I would need to consistently catalog sidewalk markings before I had earned the right to go off topic and start talking about something else I like: manhole covers. The answer is, evidently, about 14 months, because here it is, the first manhole cover of this blog. This beauty is on Hayford Avenue just south of the southwest corner of East Michigan Avenue and Hayford. The sidewalk here got redone recently due to a large new development, but the cover remained.
My recollection is that it is actually pretty common to see Bell System covers around Lansing. I assume they must date from prior to the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Our local Bell was Michigan Bell. Its “Baby Bell” identity was Ameritech. Ameritech ended up becoming my ISP around 2000 when they brought DSL to my Lansing neighborhood. As a result, I acquired an Ameritech.net email address which has never gone away. It stayed through a couple of buyouts (as my ISP became SBC Global and then AT&T). Eventually I switched ISPs but the email address remains. It is now controlled by Yahoo, and I cannot fathom why someone is still paying for the domain, but it still works. I still give it out as my main email and it forwards to my “real” but less public email address. When I tell people my address now, I have to spell it. Often they don’t know what I’m saying and write something else down. It’s no longer a name people recognize around here. But I hang onto the address as a point of pride (how many people have had an email address two decades?) and will be sad when they eventually notice it still exists and delete it without warning. Apparently the forwarding shouldn’t even still work.
Since it was dark and the stamp is so worn, you’ll have to take my word for it that this is a Lansing DPW stamp. It’s definitely from the 1940s, the question is what the last digit is. I shone a raking light over it and thought it was 1949. If so, that’s the latest DPW stamp I have found. All the 1950s stamps I have found read “Lansing DPS” instead.
It’s on the east side of Lathrop Street between Prospect and Kalamazoo, and I admit I partly wanted an excuse to show that the neighborhood has started to put its Halloween flair on, like the house this stamp is in front of.
This fading graffiti is on the driveway apron of a house on the 400 block of Regent Street (between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth). I often find that such graffiti reflects who lived in the adjacent house at the time, though the research I’m able to do online doesn’t tell me who that was. I do find that in the 1960s, there was a police officer in Lansing named Thomas Gallie. I don’t have any way to connect him with this and it may be a relative or just a sheer coincidence.
I know only a couple of things about Gallie. One is that he was the defendant in a lawsuit, as reported in the February 2, 1966, Battle Creek Enquirer. (Interestingly I was not able to find anything in the [Lansing] State Journal about it.) An MSU senior sued Gallie and three other police officers for brutality, alleging that he was beaten at the police station. The student was later found not guilty of drunken driving, which he claimed he was charged with as a ploy to cover up the beating. The next reference I can find to Gallie is in the February 21, 1968, State Journal, in a summary of recent business of the Police Board. It briefly mentions that Gallie has submitted his resignation in order to take a job with the state, and notes that he is the only officer in the department with a master’s degree.
This pair of stamps is on the west side of Jones Street between Kalamazoo and Hickory. Jones has one of those puzzlingly inconsistent sidewalks. The north half of this block has sidewalk only on the east side, but the south half has sidewalk on both sides. Then the sidewalk disappears again and never reappears; no other part of Jones has a sidewalk on this side. (The east side also loses its sidewalk south of Bement Street.)
The date of this stamp provides a possible clue as to how this happened. The sidewalk lines up exactly with the backyard of a duplex facing Hickory Street. That house was built in 1985, much later than most of the surrounding properties. I wonder if the city’s policy at the time was to require contractors to install sidewalks facing new residences.
Whatever its origin, it is a nearly pointless stretch of sidewalk. Anyone walking Jones Street is going to use the other side, where there is more consistent sidewalk. One of the side doors to the duplex connects to it, though in an awkwardly roundabout way: the side door walk connects to the driveway and the driveway to the sidewalk, but anyone coming out of the side of the house is probably just going to take the direct route across the lawn.
As for M & M Construction of Charlotte, I have been unable to find out anything about them, except that they don’t seem to be in business now.
I am reasonably confident that this is a Lansing DPW stamp based on the shape, but I really can’t guess the date except that it will be 1920s through 1940s. It’s alongside a business on the southeast corner of East Michigan Avenue and Shepard Street, on the Shepard side of the property. I have done a different stamp on this property before, but I returned to it in order to show off something I’ve stumbled across: real estate listings for properties on East Michigan Avenue.
I’ve looked at the Belon real estate agency cards that CADL has in their collection before, but hadn’t thought to look through the ones for the business corridor. It turns out to be a wonderful peek into what Michigan Avenue looked like in from the 1950s through early ’70s. From it I learned that this shop, which was Discount One Hour Signs for a long time and recently had Campus Scooter move in, was at one time Caruso’s Candy Kitchen. The real estate card, dated 1971, claims the building dates to 1967, but the city’s records indicate that the main building on the corner was built in 1912, and the smaller building to the east was added to it in 1967. The card shows Mr. and Mrs. Peter Caruso trying to sell the business for the reason of retirement. It appears that their listings in August and October 1971 were both unsuccessful. I don’t know what happened after that, but Caruso’s Candy Kitchen still existed as a business for decades afterward. I knew of them due to their presence in the Meridian Mall, near the bookstore where I used to work. They had a soda and ice cream counter as well as selling candy there. After they left, that storefront never got a tenant again, at least not for more than a short stint. Their last outpost was the ill-fated Lansing City Market. They closed in August 2013. There is a Caruso’s Candy and Soda Shop in Dowagiac that is still open, and they seem to have some connection, because in a Facebook page announcing the closing of the Lansing Caruso’s, someone asks about the Dowagiac store and the reply is “it’s just the one in Lansing that’s closing. The store in Dowagiac is still doing very well.”
The only business I can figure out prior to Caruso’s as this location was Deerfield Furs. I see an advertisement for it in the July 19, 1948, [Lansing] State Journal, and then this one on March 11, 1949:
ANNOUNCING DEERFIELD FURS UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP
Expert Furriers and Designers
FACTORY ON PREMISES
WILL OPEN APRIL 1st WITH A FULL LINE OF SPRING FURS
We Honor AO Guarantees Issued by Previous Owners
1700 E. Michigan Ave.
Remember the New Deerfleld Is Reliable
