Here’s the last of the few stamps I collected while visiting the streets near the Turner Dodge House. It’s one of those mysterious BdWL stamps (I still don’t know what that stands for and will be really excited if I ever figure it out) and it’s on Dodge River Drive at the southeast corner of Black Court.
The stamp is a long younger than the house it’s in front of, which faces Black Court and was built in 1924.
Here’s a clipping I found that some helpful Newspapers.com subscriber has clipped from the May 6, 1970, State Journal. Titled “Children Endangered: Sidewalk Need Cited,” it reports on a discussion of the need for sidewalks on Brynford and Deerfield Avenues by the Lansing Township Trustees. “Trustees are concerned about a lack of sidewalks which forces children to walk in the two streets while going to and from classes at either Windermere Park Elementary or Waverly East Junior High,” according to the article. “A particular problem area, according to Frank Fitzgerald, township supervisor, is Brynford and W. Saginaw….”
I haven’t been to the blocks in question as far as I can remember, but a Google street view shows that there is no sidewalk anywhere on Deerfield Avenue. Brynford has no sidewalk on the Saginaw end, then a sidewalk suddenly picks up on the west side of the street for a while before disappearing again mid-block. Further south, a couple more disconnected bits of sidewalk briefly appear and disappear again. One of them traverses just a single lot, as though some past owner built it voluntarily and watched in disappointment as neighbors failed to follow suit.
This is all on brand for Lansing Township. While sidewalk coverage in the City of Lansing isn’t perfect, it is much more erratic in the Township. A fairly reliable way to tell that you have crossed into Lansing Township from Lansing is the disappearance of the sidewalk.