I had a very busy and exhausting day (and have two more ahead of me) so this one is a placeholder. I mean, this one is for the planned Regent Street Catalog Project. The stamps are a pair on the west side of Regent Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth, on the 400 block. They are alongside the Auto Surgeon on the corner of Kalamazoo and Regent.
This is from the south side of Vine Street between Francis and Kipling. I had this one in my notes as “illegible” but on today’s walk the sun was just right for bringing it out. It appears to read “Zerbe.” That last name is not unknown around here, but I can’t seem to find evidence of any Zerbe in a relevant line of work.
It’s possible that this is just a piece of graffiti. I considered whether it might have been left by a previous resident of the house this is in front of. The house is a large Cape Cod, built in 1986, on an oversized corner lot. Unfortunately, that line of research didn’t turn anything up either.
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.
Here is a run-of-the-mill BBRPCI (BBR Progressive Concrete Inc.) stamp from the south side of East Grand River Avenue between Wood Street and Fairview Avenue. It is in front of Pattengill Biotechnical Academy, which should not be confused with Pattengill Middle School. Let me see if I can keep this shell game of east side schools straight: Pattengill Middle School was in the new(ish) building by the Armory, having moved there from its original location on Jerome Street (where it was known for much of its history as Pattengill Junior High). Pattengill Middle School closed in 2013 (and now that building houses Eastern High School). In 2018, the old Fairview School, which had been an elementary school, was transformed into Pattengill Biotechnical Academy. I don’t know why they reused the Pattengill name since the current Pattengill is evidently an elementary school, spanning pre-K to grade 6. I also would really like to know what the hell a specialized “biotechnical” pre-K education looks like.
It’s a good thing I don’t have kids because I find the array of schools in the district completely incomprehensible. There are high schools that start at grade 7, “academies” that go to grade 6, schools that somehow aren’t officially listed as “academies” but still have academy-like thematic names, and a very small number of I guess regular middle schools except they are grades 4-6 which is younger than what I think of as middle school. Also even the non-magnet schools have “STEAM” randomly peppered into their names.
I am pretty confident that this mostly-illegible stamp is from L. Ketchum, based on comparison with other L. Ketchum stamps. Since the others were from the 1960s, this one might be too, but the date is hopelessly worn.
This is on the east side of North Clemens Avenue just south of East Saginaw, next to the parking lot for Orion Family Dental Center. That squat-and-sturdy little brick building was built in 1959 at a cost of $18,000. I know this because on November 15, 1959, the [Lansing] State Journal ran an article titled “Permit Figures Show Local Building Down.” It includes a list of some of the larger permits from October, among them this building, which was built for dentist M.R. Licht.
Interestingly, it seems to have gone back and forth between being a dental office and other businesses a few times. It was still a dental office until at least 1969. By the late 1970s, through at least 1980, it was home to AIM, Inc., a real estate business. By 1983 it was a dental office again, but then in 1987 I see ads for Video Services Co. promising the “BEST TRANSFER SYSTEM IN TOWN.” In 2005 an agent for PRN Professional Resource Network Inc. was located there, and a 2007 Google Street View shows Orion in place. I suspect that at times it may have housed two businesses at once, since it appears to have a “garden level” with ground-level window wells, and the city’s property records call it a two story building. It would make more sense if the various the dental businesses had been continuous with each other while other businesses moved in and out. But I really don’t know.
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.
This stamp is on the south side of Prospect Street between Jones and Bingham. It is a very worn Department of Public Works stamp and though the date is illegible in this photo, I think it is 1935, based on the times I have seen it in better light.
Did you know that Lansing has a Prospect Park? Neither did I, until last year when I started walking regularly. I was looking at a route-plotting site for interesting places to walk to from home, and saw a sliver of land labeled as “Prospect Park.” My brother used to live near the Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and a favorite carousel is there, so the name caught my attention.
It turns out that, online maps aside, it might not properly be called Prospect Park after all. It’s owned by the county Land Bank rather than being under the Parks Department, and the (rather temporary-looking) sign on the site calls it “1112 Prospect Playground.” To me, it will remain Prospect Park. It takes up a city lot, and so it is narrow and deep. The main features are at the front: an evergreen tree with a small garden around it, and a set of playground equipment. The back half is just grass until you get to a couple of small garden beds in the back corners.
Although I have a strange fondness for this little pretender, I have to tell you that it is built on a tragedy. The residents of the house that previously stood here – a young engaged couple – were killed in a double homicide, at home, in 2008. Their heirs did not, or could not, keep up with the taxes on the house and it ended up in the hands of Ingham County. It sat derelict in the Land Bank for a while until, in 2015, Sparrow partnered with the Land Bank to demolish the house and create the playground. Sparrow’s involvement in this is due to the fact that residents were unhappy when Sparrow bought Bingham School and razed it to build a parking structure, as I have written about before. They lost a place for neighborhood kids to play. Prospect Park is supposed to rectify that.
The side of the big tree facing away from the street has a cryptic memorial to the murder victims: a cross with two sets of initials. The house they lived in was built in 1890 and was staid but handsome, with oddly symmetrical front porches on either corner. A few signs of the former residence can still be seen: some old, twisted fencing at the back, a driveway apron, a bit of rope that has grown into a tree.
This stamp is on the south side of Lasalle Gardens (according to the city, “Gardens” is the suffix, like “Street,” rather than part of the name proper) between Kipling and Midvale. This neighborhood on the east edge of Lansing is the Midtown subdivision, developed in the 1950s, around the same time as the nearby Frandor shopping center. It is full of neat little 1950s homes and so reminds me of the street I grew up on. The house this is in front of was built in 1955, the same year as the stamp, and so most likely the sidewalk was installed by the builders.
So who was J.A. Hicks? Well, one clue is that there was until recently a J.A. Hicks Building in East Lansing. It was a row of brick storefronts downtown, and so of course it was torn down to built a mini-Target and a big pile of lofts. Yet aside from references to the building, I could not turn up anything about J.A. Hicks, except for a few classified ads from someone by that name selling non-sidewalk-related items in the 1910s. So I tried one of my usual strategies, checking Find a Grave to see if I could determine a full name. There I found a John A. Hicks, born in 1872 and buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing. That would make him old enough to be the J.A. Hicks of the classified ads. He was also in the right line of work: Polk’s Michigan State Gazetteer and Business Directory of 1921 has an entry for John A. Hicks that attaches him to a firm called the Hicks-Nichols Co., line of business given as “real est.”
But wait: there’s a problem. John A. Hicks died in 1937. Frustratingly, I have not been able to find his obituary, which would answer the question I am left with: did he have a son with the same name or initials? There was certainly some John Hicks around East Lansing in the 1950s, but he seems to have been a merchant. On December 2, 1953, the [Lansing] State Journal reported on a “new innovation in the field of merchandising In East Lansing these days,” which was “the dressing up of the back doors to shops along the city’s main street to attract customers from the city’s new municipal parking lots.” It goes on to say that “John Hicks opened up the back door of his shop when the first municipal lot was completed several years ago.” The January 24, 1956, State Journal article refers to “John Hicks, retiring president of the city’s Merchants Association.”
I tried the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection index, but there wasn’t a single entry for the keyword “Hicks” – this despite the fact that John A. Hicks’s death was considered notable enough to rate an entry in the State Journal‘s article “Chronological List of Important Events in Lansing During Past Year” on New Year’s Day 1938. Under the subheading “Important Deaths of Year” is “Nov. 10 – John A. Hicks, East Lansing business man, succumbed.”
This entry marks the debut of a new, I hope recurring, feature: the Hall of Fame. Regular readers know that I already have a Hall of Shame. I thought I should balance it with a feature celebrating the unsung heroes who have, in some way, gone above and beyond for the cause of sidewalks in Lansing.
The homeowner on the northeast corner of Jones and Larned is apparently responsible for this “sidewalk” made of pavers. It picks up where the sidewalk abruptly ends on Larned and goes to Jones Street. Across Jones to the west, the official sidewalk resumes. Google Street View images of this block from 2011 show a deep furrow where people have been walking across the lawn to get from one disconnected sidewalk to the next, so a path was obviously sorely needed.
I find it really strange that the sidewalk ends about two lot widths from the edge of Jones, only to resume again after. I have no inside knowledge about how the city decides where sidewalks have to be installed, but I have noticed some patterns from which I have inferred rules, or at least rules of thumb. A block that has no houses facing it will usually not have a sidewalk. If a house is the last one on a block before a dead end or an unoccupied block, the sidewalk might end there. But if there is at least one house on a block, and somewhere else one might be walking to from there, it usually has a sidewalk all the way along. This gap on Larned is an anomaly, at least compared with the experiences I’ve had of east side sidewalks.
I wonder if the city would have granted the permit needed for the resident to just decide to install a proper sidewalk. They can compel an owner to install one (I’ve seen it in very old news articles), but can they forbid it? Would they be likely to, if someone wanted to pay for it? I don’t know. But as a “good enough” solution and a service to pedestrians, this “sidewalk” earns my respect. So won’t you join me in saluting the inaugural sidewalk Hall of Famer?
This one is on the front walk of a house on the north side of Jerome Street between Custer and Rumsey. Unfortunately it is not quite legible in full. The name appears to be two initials and then a surname. The surname looks like it starts with “Look-” but might actually be “Locke” as I can find evidence of a family with that name in Lansing in this time period. The line underneath that is totally illegible. I had no joy trying to find any contractor matching these details. At least the date is clear enough.
