Today’s stamp is in front of the same address as yesterday’s – the Budget/Avis lot on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Kipling and Lasalle Court. It’s just east of Kipling, close to the crosswalk.
The E. T. MacKenzie Company was established in 1982 in Grand Ledge and still has its headquarters there, although it now also has a few branch offices in Michigan and one in Florida. They offer construction, demolition, and remediation services according to their Web site, so I guess you could say they’re a Mack of all trades.
Notice the style of the stamp. I first encountered it as the new style O & M stamp, and have subsequently observed it in use by several contractors. Evidently some third party sells them using a standard template. They look neat enough, but I would sacrifice orderly for unique.
When I started this sidewalk project I don’t think I realized how much time I would end up sinking into researching local business history. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but I also need to tone it down a little. I’ve developed a particular fascination with the stretch of East Michigan Avenue I’ve begun thinking of as “Eastmost.” From what I can tell, it used to be the car salesdistrict. Tonight’s stamp comes from the north side of East Michigan between Kipling and Lasalle Court.
It’s another mystery stamp in the vein of this mystery stamp, but the two of them help fill in the gaps with each other. The faint area on this one matches the Y in the earlier one, and the clear A in this one matches the faint area of the other. Since the other ends in 02 and this one in 03 it’s tempting to treat that as a date. But who or what is “DAY”? And why the odd spacing (or lack thereof)?
This is close to the corner of Kipling, in front of the Avis/Budget car rental agency. The office building was built in the 1990s. The garage on the property (they don’t share a street address, but are part of the same lot according to city records) dates from 1940. I don’t know who the original occupant was, but by in the 1950s it was Hodgson & Osborn Used Cars, as pictured in this 1958 photo filed in the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection. “Note arborist in tree in center of photo,” directs the caption. It appears that the arborist is in the act of taking the tree down. They evidently didn’t replace it, as there is no street tree there now.
Sometime after Hodgson & Osborn, certainly by the 1970s, it became Spartan Auto Sales. In 1981 the address starts showing up in newspaper ads still attached to Spartan Auto Sales but also as the address for Ugly Duckling Rent-a-Car and Ugly Duckling Car Lot. I’m not sure how it was both Spartan and Ugly Duckling at the same time, but that seems to be the case.
Sometime in the late 1980s it became Thrifty and then eventually Budget/Avis. Thus it went through the same progression from a car lot, through a less respectable car lot, to a car rental agency, as the current Enterprise location.
BBRPCI (B.B.R. Progressive Concrete, Inc.) stamps are a dime a dozen in the neighborhood, but most are from the 1980s. This one, and a few others on the same block, are notable for being the newest BBRPCI stamps I have yet found. I don’t exactly know when the company ceased to exist, but OpenCorporates shows them incorporating in 1979 and dissolving in 2016.
This one is right in front of the entrance to the former Allen Street School on the south side of East Kalamazoo Street between Shephard and Allen. The school was built in 1913 and expanded in 1926. It closed in 2005 and the building was purchased by the dystopian-sounding biotechnology company Neogen. This was hailed as a victory for preservation.
In writing this, I suddenly realized something I had been rather oblivious to. In my early years in Lansing, I often walked to the bus stop at Michigan and Clemens to get to work in the morning, and on the way would cross with help from the light at Kalamazoo and Clemens. There would be a crossing guard there helping children cross safely, just like when I was a kid walking to and from elementary school. (Do they even let children walk to school anymore?)
One day years later, well after I had quit riding the bus regularly, I suddenly thought: hey, what happened to the crossing guard? When is the last time I saw one there? I realize now what it was. Those children were going to Allen Street School, and the crossing guard disappeared with the school, around the same time I started working a job I had to drive to anyway. I missed the moment when that changed because my own life changed at the same time.
Able Concrete and Cantu & Sons went in opposite directions: Able added “Concrete” to their stamp sometime between 1999 and 2004, while Cantu & Sons dropped it in 1987.
This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Magnolia and Hayford, in front of the McDaniels Insurance Agency.
This pleasantly old-fashioned little storefront was built in 1910. I don’t know for sure how long McDaniels has occupied the building, only that they don’t own it. Google Street View shows them moving in sometime between 2011 and 2015, preceded by Salon on Michigan. Based on city personal property tax records, I can see that other businesses that have occupied it include Afrikan Egyptian Bazaar (seemingly in the late 90s to early 2000s, though I don’t remember it at all) and some rando named Virgil Bernero. I’m just kidding, Virg, I voted for you. Based on the dates, he must have used it as his campaign office for the 2005 election.
This is on the north side of Prospect St. between Bingham and Jones. The hollow letters look nice, and I haven’t seen that style in any other stamps.
Unfortunately, despite it being relatively recent, I have been unable to find anything out about the contractor. Searching for any combination of “tower” and “concrete” or “builder” or “contractor” turns up a whole lot of irrelevant results. I tried searching Michigan’s registry of corporations but there were 22 pages of businesses with names starting with “tower.”
Another detail that incidentally comes forward in this picture is how different the composition of different slabs is. There seems to be a broad range of possible concrete mixes for sidewalks. I know just about nothing about concrete, and I am curious about why there is so much variation.
