This is on the south side of Hickory Street between Jones and Holmes. I found it first over the winter, but the sidewalks were too slushy for me to have any hope of reading it. I waited to see if nicer weather would make it legible. Sadly, it did not. It was a beautiful day today and the sidewalk was as clear as it is going to get, and still the only legible part is the very clear date. There is a name there, but the only part I can read is an E at the beginning, and a suspected O at the end (perhaps part of Co.). Too bad.
“Huntley” is inscribed on the front walk of a house on the east side of South Fairview Avenue, between Elizabeth and Harton. The east side of this block – the 600 block – is entirely populated by nearly identical little Cape Cods. They are around 600 square feet and, according to the city, one-and-a-quarter stories. There are actually two different styles that alternate, one with a symmetrical front consisting of two windows and a centered door, the other with a single window and a door to one side. There are nine of these houses; a tenth on the corner of Harton was demolished in 2015. There is also another one just south of Harton, the only house on the east side of the 700 block. Curiously, they were built in 1941 and 1942, with the southern half of the houses having the later year. That’s a strange time to be building houses.
Despite their conformity, I really like them. Maybe it’s the coziness of a row of little cottages all lined up, or maybe it’s the way that their outline looks like the Platonic form of a house, or at least a child’s drawing of one.
The nearest house in this picture has the “Huntley” mark, at the sidewalk end of the front walk.
I haven’t been able to determine who Huntley was, though I presume a past resident of the house. While I can find references in old newspapers to people named Huntley living in Lansing, without addresses attached to them, I have no way to guess which, if any, this Huntley might have been.
This stamp is on an orphaned driveway apron in front of one of the many vacant lots (now a community garden) near the south end of South Francis Avenue. It’s on the east side of the street, just south of where Harton Street would have passed through if it had not vanished from this block at some point. There is another driveway apron (also no longer attached to a driveway) one lot south of here that has the same stamp, but in worse shape.
I tried to uncover the date from under the layer of caked dirt, but it doesn’t look like it would be legible even if it were clean. It seems to end with a 1 but that’s the most that can be made from it with any confidence. I wasn’t able to find any plausible “Terry” that this could be, either.
I’ve posted this one before, a long time ago; it was among my earliest entries. But when I passed it recently, the light on it was so perfect that I thought it deserved another outing. The photo, while nice, doesn’t quite get across how perfectly the shadows fell on it; in person, it caused the optical illusion that the letters were raised instead of inset.
This stamp is at the northeast corner of Prospect Street and Foster Avenue.
I was surprised to walk down to the south end of South Francis Avenue and discover a large amount of sidewalk has been replaced on the west side of the street. The scattered blocks of new concrete – there must be a couple dozen or more – can be readily seen at a distance. The work was done by White Hawk, the same contractor who recently did a similarly large replacement project on South Magnolia. What surprises me about this find, though, is that a good bit of sidewalk from the east side of Francis has been removed as the lots have vacated. I expected they would just let the sidewalk on the other side keep deteriorating while they waited out the remaining residents, but I was clearly wrong.
Many of the lawn extensions (or “parkways” as the Lansing municipal code calls them) are also covered with straw, indicating grass reseeding. The edges of some front yards have this too. I’m not sure of the reason for this.
This particular stamp (one of very many similar ones) is from the west side of Francis south of Elizabeth. It’s in front of one of the many nearby community gardens, this one calling itself the Poppin’ Fresh Community Garden.
This one is on South Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the Marathon station at the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and Kalamazoo. It’s your basic, run-of-the-mill 1940s Department of Public Works stamp, very common around here.
Although I think of this gas station as being on Kalamazoo because it faces that way, I have learned that its street address is on Penn. It’s been a familiar sight for me for a long time, but I’ve never been inside it. I’m always headed out of town in the other direction when I stop for gas. Years ago, its canopy said MARATHON on one end and CONEY ISLAND on the other, and a sign on the side of the building dubbed it “Marathon Coney Island.” When my now-husband, then-sweetheart was first visiting me in Lansing, I drove past it while we were going somewhere, and in a bemused voice he said, “Coney Island?” I distractedly replied, “Oh yeah, I think they just have a food counter in there or something and that’s why it says that.” What I had completely forgotten is that as a New Jersey native he would be unfamiliar with the use of “Coney Island” to describe a specific kind of diner in Michigan. It occurred to me only a long time afterward that this would have sounded like a complete non sequitur. He didn’t ask for clarification at the time.
Sadly (in a way), the CONEY ISLAND banner is gone now, since it instead houses one of the locations of Jose’s Cuban Sandwich and Deli. I have had food delivered from there and it is very good. I just miss the big CONEY ISLAND letters.
The city’s online property records show that this building dates from 1964. I have a hard time imagining it as anything but a gas station, and yet I find Lansing State Journal ads from 1997 for Advanced Imaging Services Inc. at this location. Even more surprising, photos in the city’s property records seem to show that it only converted into a gas station around December 2004 (the city’s records show Advanced Imaging selling the property in July that year), and that it was vacant again by May 2008. I remember it as though it had always been the Marathon Coney Island until Jose’s moved in, but somehow it wasn’t even a gas station for the first several years I lived in town and I have no recollection of that now at all.
I heard that there was a fire at the house behind Liz’s Alteration Shop (on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Leslie and Regent), so I walked over to see how bad it looks. Unfortunately, the answer is pretty bad. Liz McMurray, who was featured in the 2022 People Issue of the City Pulse, owns the property and lives in the house, but she was out of town when it happened. The firefighters were fortunately able to save some important sentimental items including her family Bible.
I decided I might as well get this shot of a BBRPCI stamp while I was there.
According to the city’s records, the house and the attached shopfront were both built in 1912. Liz’s Alteration Shop has been there since 1978.
Everything looks normal from this angle. The stamp is near the closest flower pot, there.
Unfortunately, here you can see how bad the attic and second floor look. I read that it did not damage the shop.
This is an illustration of the two ways the city deals with trip hazards in the sidewalk, on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Shepard and Leslie. The sidewalk slabs are frequently heaved up by trees, and some stretches of sidewalk on the east side resemble obstacle courses as a result. When someone cares enough to report a trip hazard, the city either uses asphalt to make a sort of ramp between the two pieces of walk, or grinds the sidewalk down until the edges are flush again.
The former approach is almost useless in my estimation. The asphalt almost always has a blunt enough edge to be its own trip hazard, and it ends up crumbling and getting even craggier over time. The grinding method works very well, making a wonderfully smooth transition. As a bonus it looks kind of neat, exposing the rock within the concrete and leaving behind an almost polished sheen.
I don’t know how the city decides which approach to use. The asphalt method is described as a “temporary fix,” but I’ve seen ones that have clearly been around for ages. The grinding method “is only appropriate for addressing trip hazards where the sidewalk section is otherwise intact (not cracked or broken),” which could explain why some spots get the asphalt instead, but I have seen plenty of asphalt patches on intact blocks. So I’m not sure why they don’t use the clearly superior grinding method more universally.
I habitually watch the sidewalk when I’m walking around the neighborhood so that I can notice sidewalk stamps, but now that I’ve mined the east side so thoroughly, I’ve started to branch out and also look at any front walks I pass. Today I noticed these two stamps on the west side of South Foster Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.
The front walk is the closest (southernmost) one in this photo. A smaller path, leading presumably to the back of the house, is visible near the center of the photo.
There are two walks leading up to this house, one being the main front walk to the porch, and the other being a smaller path leading around to the back of the house. I noticed the one on the smaller path first and thought the date was 1937, but wasn’t entirely sure, as it could also have been 1987.
This is the northern stamp, on the smaller walk.
Then I saw the stamp on the front walk, which is a much clearer 1937. I can’t be totally sure they are from the same contractor, since they do look a bit different, but that might just be due to uneven wear. It seems likely they were done at the same time. They don’t date to the construction of the house; that was back in 1910.
This is the front walk (southern) stamp.
They are tantalizingly close to legible, but unfortunately I can only pick out a few letters.
I like two things about this front walk on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Shepard and Leslie: the very crisp, angled “1975” in either corner of the front step, and the way the walk forks instead of coming straight forward to the street.
I dislike just one thing about it: the lack of the contractor’s name.
