We finally had a little bit of snow (now long since obliterated by the weather turning warm again) and I took a walk in it to get photos of Christmas lights. I also found some beautiful snow-frosted sidewalk stamps. I love the way snow settles into the lettering; in some cases, as in the B.F. Churchill stamp below, it even makes it more legible.
A 1944 Department of Public Works stamp on Regent Street.
This 1908 B.F. Churchill stamp on Regent was one of the stamps that first motivated this blog. The extreme purple cast is due to a defective LED street light.
In honor of the holiday, here are some of the photos I took of Christmas lights on my walk. I have really come to enjoy walking alone in snowy quiet after night falls, stopping to stand in front of Christmas displays and admire them. Driving around to admire lights is nice, and I do that too, but there is something special about the intimacy of doing it on foot. Being a pedestrian is underrated.
I found a pair of diagonal Lansing DPW stamps on either corner of a driveway apron, facing the street, on the east side of Clifford Street between Elizabeth and Fuller. Given how often I walk around this block and my particular interest in collecting diagonal stamps, I’m a little surprised I haven’t noticed them before. They are very faint – one of them was too faint to show up in a photograph.
Here is a faded date with no name, or possibly one that had a name that is no longer visible. It’s at the southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street, on Marcus. I’m interested in it because I have found relatively few 1949 stamps, and because the typeface makes me think of a DPW stamp. I’m trying to narrow down when the DPW because the DPS and right now the earliest DPS stamp I’ve found has been 1950, but there is a possible 1947 one that is difficult to read.
Oh goody, one for my diagonal stamp collection. (I like corner markings, for some reason.) It’s quite faint and in fact I walk past here quite often and had not noticed it before. I think the wet pavement and the lighting brought it out this time. The date appears to be 1947 and the name is certainly either Lansing DPS or DPW. The DPS stamps and the 1920s-40s DPW stamps are similar in appearance.
What strikes me as interesting here is that it does look to me like it is DPS, and I had previously not found a DPS stamp from before 1950. I am not sure why or when the DPW changed to the DPS, but it changed to DPS sometime prior to 1950 (or, depending on this stamp, 1947), and then back again sometime between 1953 and 1977, and then started stamping O & M (Operations and Maintenance, part of the Division of Public Service) sometime between 1992 and 2005.
This stamp is outside Papa John’s Pizza on East Michigan Avenue, near the southwest corner of Michigan and Allen.
The May 16, 1940, State Journal has a “Notice to Property Owners of Sidewalk Construction” for a large number of properties on Lenawee, Washtenaw, and Gordon Avenue, all on the west side. I see such notices a lot in the 1910s, but not so often this far into the century. The official verbiage used is nearly the same as it was 25 years previous: “Resolved by the city council of that it Is a necessary public Improvement…” but instead of saying that “a sidewalk shall be constructed” this commands that a sidewalk shall be “repaired.” So evidently, someone had laid a lot of bum walk on Lenawee and Gordon, since it was already in such need of repair by 1940. Also of interest is that the resolution was brought by an Alderman Schneeberger; I don’t know if he was any relation to the E. Schneeberger whose name turns up in 1920s sidewalk markings.
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.
There are plenty of 1944 DPW stamps on Horton Street, but this one, on the east side of the street between Michigan and Jerome, is unusually placed. It’s on the sidewalk across the house’s driveway, and it faces sideways, toward the house, as though it were showing off to the homeowner.
This is in front of the same house as the nearly-gone hall of shame sidewalk from the last entry.
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 one is on the apron of a driveway on the west side of North Fairview Avenue between Vine and Fernwood. It’s stamped diagonally on the south corner of the apron, facing the sidewalk so pedestrians can admire it. I am mildly curious what circumstances result in the city having to construct (or more likely reconstruct) someone’s driveway apron. I’m guessing it happens when they have to tear up for sewer work, for instance.
An overview of the driveway apron. There is also an Ayala’s stamp on the other side, but Ayala’s chose to have it face the street instead.
