I’m a roller coaster, carousel, and general amusement park enthusiast, and I recently returned from a trip that included a stop at Kings Island in Kings Mills, Ohio (near Cincinnati). I didn’t see any concrete markings there, but I did find this brick with the logo of Hicon, Inc. in the Oktoberfest area. There were several such bricks set here and there in the brick walkway.
Hicon is a masonry and paving contractor based in Cincinnati. According to their About Us page, they were founded in 1977, the same year the Demon roller coaster (now defunct) opened at Kings Island, and a couple of years before the famous Beast.
We took our (nearly) annual roller coaster vacation to California this year, to visit a few parks in and near the southern Bay Area. One of those parks was Gilroy Gardens in Gilroy, California, the so-called Garlic Capital of the World. It’s an arrestingly scenic park, less an amusement park than a botanical garden that has some rides. One of their most popular rides are paddle boats in the shape of ducks, geese, and swans, which give you free roam in the small lake at the center of the park. It was on a bridge near the boats that my husband spotted a sidewalk stamp.
One of the posts for the guardrail has obliterated the first few letters of the contractor’s name, but I looked at a list of concrete contractors in Morgan Hill and the only one that matches is Sycamore Concrete Construction. Unfortunately I can’t find a Web site or any other information about them, except for a listing at OpenCorporates which shows the corporation being founded in 1985 and dissolved in 2022.
It seems odd that they bothered stamping a spot where it would end up being illegible, but I have to assume they did not know where the guardrail was going to be placed when they did the stamping. Maybe it was a later addition and the original fence was outside the concrete.
I was lucky enough to find a second sidewalk stamp during my recent mini-vacation, this one at Sylvan Beach Amusement Park, a thoroughly charming old park on Oneida Lake, New York. The stamp is in front of an ice cream stand, where I bought a Pepsi float that really hit the spot on a hot day. Sadly, the stamp is undated. The park has been in existence since the 1870s or 1880s (sources seem to disagree on this point) but the pavement is surely not that old. From the condition and style of the stamp, I would make a handwaving guess that it dates from the 1920s or so.
I love that arc layout, which was also popular among Lansing contractors.
N.D. Peters & Co. does not seem to be in business today. The earliest reference I can find to the company is the 1910 Proceedings of the Board of Contract and Supply of Utica, which reports that N.D. Peters & Co was awarded a contract for the construction of artificial stone sidewalks in Utica, “being the lowest bidder therefor” with bids of 14, 15, and 16 cents per square foot for various sidewalks. In 1914, the Proceedings of the Board of Contract and Supply again reports that they were awarded a contract for the construction of artificial stone sidewalks. This time their bid was 16 cents per square foot on all proposed streets “except Book 3, Map 16, Block 17, Lot 2, Elizabeth street, on which they bid 50 cents per square foot.” I wonder why that one lot on Elizabeth Street was so expensive to pave. (I also have noticed in doing research for this blog that the style around the 1910s was not to capitalize “street” when used along with the name of a street, which looks odd to my contemporary eyes.) A 1913 Utica city directory locates the business on Kossuth Avenue.
I’m not exactly sure when N.D. Peters went out of business. OpenCorporates gives its dissolution date as 2001, but that doesn’t always mean the business was still functioning by then (or even that it necessarily ceased to exist in some form). They were at least still around by 1999, when they were found by the National Labor Relations Board to have violated someone’s union contract by failing to recall him after a layoff.
I took a short vacation over the last week to visit a few amusement parks (I have hobbies other than sidewalk photography). While we were walking through the sprawling queue of Flight Deck, a roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland, my husband suddenly pointed at the ground. There was a contractor stamp. I held up the line for a few moments to take this photo, muttering aloud to myself that everyone must be wondering what this crazy woman is doing.
Flight Deck opened under its original name, Top Gun (yes, that Top Gun) in 1995, so this stamp dates to the ride’s original construction. Upper Canada Construction doesn’t have a Web presence, but Google suggests a company by that name currently exists in York, Ontario, which is close to Canada’s Wonderland.
