I made another expedition to my alma mater, MSU, to pick something up from the library. I parked in my favorite lot, the metered spaces arranged in a horseshoe by the Hannah Administration Building, and walked across the expansive pavement there. It brought back a distinct memory of marching in front of the building sometime around 2003, chanting union slogans, in the early days of the Graduate Employees Union. I had the honor of being one of the founding members.
Today – May 5 – is the 20th anniversary of the day I defended my dissertation at MSU. I don’t recall seeing this sidewalk being laid, and don’t know whether it was before or after my graduation. It is right out in front of the admin building, and I surely walked over it or its predecessor during that demonstration.
My back is to Hannah the building here, but Hannah the bronze statue is visible in the upper right distance.
This is only the second place I’ve found a Lansing Poured Wall stamp. The other ones were on Jolly Road in front of Capital Honda, also dated 2004.
As the news broke yesterday evening that 126-year-old Sparrow Hospital will be acquired by the University of Michigan’s health system, I decided to mark the end of an era by walking to Sparrow and recording a sidewalk stamp. It’s one I first noticed a long time ago and kept putting on the back burner and then eventually forgot about. I checked and re-checked my spreadsheet (yes, I have a spreadsheet), since I was having trouble believing I had never done it. It’s in front of the Sparrow Professional Building on East Michigan Avenue, which is across the street from the main Sparrow building, connected to it by a skywalk. The new sidewalk likely dates from a big expansion project that Sparrow started in 2003.
Granger Construction is based on Aurelius Road on the south side of Lansing and health care construction is one of their areas of expertise. Their Web site disappointingly does not include a company history.
The stamp is at the bottom of this image. Its twin is just before the crosswalk.
Sparrow has had this Christmas decoration on its roof every year as long as I’ve lived in town. It’s gotten more colorful, though, and I assume was fitted with LEDs at some point.
I was at the Turner-Dodge House for the Fairy Tale Festival on Saturday, and I noticed this H & C stamp on the sidewalk that leads from the rear of the house to the River Trail. It’s a little hard to read the date, but I think it is 2004.
The stamp in context (close to the bottom of the frame). You can see people leaving the Festival, as it has just ended.
And here’s the Turner-Dodge House, from whence the path leads.
These two stamps are on the south side of Prospect Street between Virginia and Rosamond. One is on the driveway of a house and the other is on its front walk. (There is inexplicably no sidewalk on the south side of Prospect between Holmes and Clifford.)
The stamp on the driveway.
I can’t find anything out about Washburn Construction. I can find references to a Washburn Construction in Shelby (which is on the west side of the state between Whitehall and Ludington) but that is too far-flung to be likely. There is a Washburn Contracting Innovations in Almont (in the thumb region), but they appear to focus on carpentry. I doubt this was either of them.
The stamp on the front walk (which ends at the curb since there is no sidewalk).
The house itself (built in 1924) is extremely cute. This style of house, with the rounded roof and eyebrow dormers, isn’t common in the neighborhood. In fact, I don’t know of another one like it.
I love this house. And I kind of think this house loves me back.
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.
I was walking on the west side of South Francis Avenue between Marcus and Elizabeth when I spotted a Concrete by Thompson stamp with a reversed date. At first I thought it was one I have featured before, but then I realized I was not on the same street. No, evidently Concrete by Thompson managed to reverse their date stamp at least twice in 2004.
I wonder if these two reversed Thompson stamps were done on the same day. They were done the same year, a few blocks apart in Urbandale, so I can imagine they might have been done one after the other, accounting (somewhat) for the same stamping error.
This stamp is on the west side of South Magnolia Avenue between Marcus and Horton. (It’s just north of where Elizabeth Street would be, if it didn’t disappear for a couple of blocks.) My husband actually found this one first and told me about it, but I forgot where he said it was, and then ended up running across it on my own.
What happened here? Yes, the date was accidentally reversed, but how? This forces me to admit that I have no idea what these stamps actually look like such that it’s possible to reverse them. I always picture something that looks like a branding iron, but then how could this happen?
Looking around a bit, I find this site selling name stamps for contractors. Here’s another example from a different company. The stamps pictured have holes so that a new year stamp can be inserted. That makes sense, but I still don’t see how the date can end up mirrored. The raised numbers are only on one side of the stamp as far as I can tell. Upside-down is a more obvious way this could go wrong.
Looking south on South Magnolia. This is in Urbandale, so of course what’s up ahead is an urban farm.
This is a different (and nicer, in my view) version of J.A. Iszler’s stamp than I posted the other day. It is on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Clemens and Fairview, in front of Toarmina’s Pizza.
Toarmina’s wasn’t there yet in 2004. Instead, this storefront was currently home to Lopez Bakery, the business I still associate it most with. Lopez was a combination Mexican bakery and coffee bar (I think the coffee bar may have been a separate business that shared space with them). They moved in sometime during my early years in Lansing (I moved here in 1999) and closed in 2007. I never got baked goods from there, but I remember that they also shared the location with a coffee bar and I think I got coffee from there once or twice.
I don’t know what was originally in this storefront, but an advertisement in the December 17, 1926, Lansing State Journal gives it as the address of Universal Grocery. They were advertising a moving sale as they were moving to 1220 East Grand River (which has more recently been various party stores and a City Pulse Eyesore of the Week) in what is now called Old Town. I’m if they were the original occupant of the Toarmina’s address or not. The business appears to have become a dry cleaner in the 1930s and ’40s.
The stamp (there is only one, no twin this time) in context, looking west on East Michigan.
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.
