I was in Albion today visiting family, so this is a stamp I found in Albion on my evening walk there. I’ve never seen anything like it in Lansing, nor elsewhere in Albion (but I have not walked very widely in Albion). The stamps are at the northeast corner of East Erie Street and South Mingo Street, and they give the names of the respective streets. I wonder if there was a time when all the streets in Albion had these stamps at the intersections. It does appear very old. I like the idea; sometimes it’s hard to see street signs, especially if they are placed at the opposite corner, and it would be convenient to have the streets marked right at one’s feet.
This is the southern end of Mingo Street, while Erie continues both east and west.
This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Shepard and Leslie. It’s in front of one of the various old homes, mostly American Foursquares, that have been converted to retail. This is a particularly old house – 1880, according to the city’s records. The most recent business here was Kimlan Flowers and Gifts, but it has been out of business as long as I can remember, the awning out front getting more and more tattered until finally the last remnants of the cover on it were removed. The sign offering it for sale or lease has been there at least ten years.
I have found surprisingly little about the history of the property. The earliest reference I can find to a business at the address was in the 1970s, when it was Better Properties, Inc., a real estate business. Better Properties sold it in 1995, but in the the city records, the field that should say whom it was sold to is blank. They have an undated photo of the business as ACD Computers (the predecessor of internet provider ACD.net), which I assume came between the Better Properties and Kimlan eras.
The stamp is nothing too special. There are a lot of Isabella Corp. stamps from around 2016 on this stretch of Michigan Avenue.
The stamp is outside the frame here, but located in front of the front steps of the house.
This is an intriguing mystery, on the west side of North Foster Avenue between Michigan and Vine. I have walked past this pair of stamps at different times of day, hoping I would find some combination of light and shadow that would make one of them legible, but I have given up. They are just too worn to give up their identity. The part I can make out, or at least I think I can, is the bottom arc: it appears to be “LANSING MICHIGAN.”
The southern stamp.
The style, typeface, and inclusion of the city and state are features characteristic of early stamps. Unfortunately, I can’t make out either the name or a date. The top arc is surely a name, and the depressed area in the center could well be a date, but there’s not enough left to have even a clue what it is. There are two stamps. The southern one has the somewhat readable bottom line, but the rest is hopeless. The northern stamp is deeper but no more readable, except that the first letter of the first line might be a K.
The northern stamp.
I’m sorry to say that this one is probably totally lost, except as a reminder of how old the sidewalks are and how many little mysteries are written on them.
Looking south on North Foster from the northern stamp.
Sorry, this is blatantly a placeholder (though I could rationalize it as part of an eventual project to exhaustively catalogue Regent Street, since I’m probably about halfway there at this point). The reason is that I went to Cedar Point today, my first time at an amusement park since 2019. It was a big day for me, so I hope you’ll forgive the modest entry. (By “you” I mean “my dear husband,” as I think he is the only person who reads these.)
Anyway, this is on the west side of the 400 block of Regent Street, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.
Good old Regent Street. This is pointing south, meaning if you kept walking past the edge of what’s visible here you would hit Regent Park.
This fortunately well-lit stamp is on the south side of Prospect Street between Pennsylvania and Eighth. There are a pair of them, and they appear to be handwritten. I had noticed this one before and found it curious, as X is an uncommon initial to appear in a contractor stamp.
I assumed it was a given name such as Xavier. Instead I have discovered that this is most likely the mark of Xtreme Mason Contractors of Laingsburg. Their slogan is “Xtreme Masonry: Fortified with Hell Bricks!”1
OK, no it isn’t. Their Web site says they are a 100% women-owned business, which might be a first for the blog, and that they specialize in commercial masonry repair and historic building restoration. They were founded in 2005.
Looking east toward Pennsylvania Avenue.
1 I borrowed this joke from a Zippy the Pinhead comic from, I think, the late 1990s. I wish I could find it again. It involves a discussion of things being promoted as “extreme” and ends with Zippy declaring, “Extreme Oreos! Fortified with hell sugar!”
I was at Capital Honda finding out how much my aging car is going to set me back today (answer: too much) and decided to scout for sidewalk stamps out front. I walked a long way in front of the business (which is on the south side of Jolly Road between James Phillips Drive and Hulett Road, about a mile west of Okemos Road) without seeing any stamps, so I began to think they just don’t stamp the sidewalks out here in the eastern wilds. However, just as I reached the western edge of the property I found this one.
At first I thought it was undated, but it was just the bright sun washing out the faint mark of the year. A more careful look allowed me to make it out as 2004, which was the year Capital Honda was built. I thought it was a bit chintzy that they had only one stamp in such a long run of new sidewalk. (There may have been one on the eastern edge of the property too. I didn’t walk all the way to the other end as my ride arrived.) That got me wondering what rules, if any, govern sidewalk marking in this town.
Looking east from the edge of the Capital Honda property, with the stamp at the bottom edge of the photo.
The area is, by convention though not legally, considered part of Okemos. I assumed it was properly in Meridian Charter Township, but when I got home and checked I discovered it’s just over the border to the south and thus it is in Alaiedon Township. Alaiedon is what’s called a general law township, the most basic kind of municipality in Michigan. Anywhere that hasn’t incorporated (as a charter township, village or city) defaults to being a general law township, following the borders of its survey township. Alaiedon doesn’t have its complete municipal code online like Lansing and Lansing Township do. None of the ordinances they have posted on their Web site relate to sidewalks, and the building permit forms they have available don’t have anything to say about sidewalk construction. If Alaiedon has anything at all to say about building sidewalks, I can’t find it.
I haven’t seen the name Lansing Poured Wall before. According to state records, they were incorporated in 1965 and dissolved in 2012. I noticed that the registered agent was someone named Garfield R. Bowman. This leads me to wonder if he is any relation to George Bowman, who co-founded Fessler & Bowman in 1963. It’s not a terribly unusual name, but when I see two people with the same last name in the same business, I always wonder.
This stamp is at the edge of the street, on the driveway belonging to Innova Salon and Day Spa, on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Allen and Shepard. L & L stamps are plentiful; I am more interested in the building this is in front of. Like several of the businesses in this stretch of Michigan, it is a big old house that has been converted into retail.
It has an impressive second floor porch, and the surprising part is that it isn’t original to the house. Google’s street view of the house taken in 2007 shows it with no porch on the second story (and thus looking like a more standard-for-the-neighborhood American Foursquare). No windows on the second story either; they apparently got covered over at some point in its retail history. The street view from 2008 shows it being renovated, with windows reappearing on the second floor and the previous first-floor storefront addition now absent. It looks much handsomer now than it did before the renovation.
I’m not sure when it went from residential to retail, but it spent a few decades as MacLaughlin’s Piano Mart (later MacLaughlin’s Piano and Organ Mart). On November 30, 1980, a Lansing State Journal ad reads, “DOUG BROWN MUSIC (formerly MacLaughlin) – serving Lansing over 30 years.” By 1997 the address was home to Print King. There really does seem to have been a time when this stretch of Michigan Avenue was the print shop district. I can think of at least four former print shops in the vicinity. A photo in the city’s property records dated March 2001 shows the Print King signage in place but a “FOR SALE” sign in the window. The 2007 Google street view shows Rapid Appliance Service here instead. Innova Salon moved in soon after.
Here is a curiously unsigned date stamp from the north side of Prospect between Bingham and Pennsylvania. Most of the 1940s stamps I find are from the Department of Public Works, so I am inclined to suspect their hand in this. If so, I am sorry they didn’t complete the marking, as I have no 1949 DPW stamps recorded, and I am trying to figure out when they switched to stamping DPS instead. The latest 1940s stamp I have found is a 1945 which probably says DPW but that part is worn enough to be unclear. The next prior one I have is a clear 1944 DPW stamp. After that it skips to 1950, at which time they were now identifying themselves as the Lansing DPS.
Looking west at the corner of Prospect and Pennsylvania. The house here faces Pennsylvania.
I’m inducting this unstamped stretch of new sidewalk into the Hall of Shame. It’s located on the east side of Allen Street north of Kalamazoo, in front of the new Allen Place development. Contractor, your name is not upon the walk.
Strange that this one is unstamped, when the new sidewalk on the Shepard Street side of the building, laid late last year and earlier this one, is very neatly marked by Leavitt & Starck.
An awful housefire happened the day before yesterday, on the west side of Horton Street between Michigan and Jerome (125 Horton). The family lost four pets and all their possessions, and the house was ruined. I walked past it today and it had already been demolished. It was a nice old house, built in 1914. The whole business is very sad.
The southern stamp, barely legible in the mud. (It was raining.)
To mark the end of the house’s time in the neighborhood, I collected the only stamps from the sidewalk out front. They are both Cantu & Sons, probably a pair. The southern stamp is undated. The northern stamp may have been dated originally; it’s hard to tell because of how worn it is. I have seen Cantu stamps in this style from 1986 and ’87, so this likely dates from around then.
The northern stamp is easier to read but does not appear to have been dated.
