This is another sidewalk-adjacent and Lansing-non-adjacent entry. There is a one-room schoolhouse, the Bohannon School, on the southwest corner of West Campus Drive and West Preston Street, close to the building where I work at Central Michigan University. I’ve seen it many times but never walked up to it, so on a recent walk I did. I was immediately charmed by the brick front walk, particularly the old-looking embossing on the bricks.

The schoolhouse was built in 1901 but only moved here for restoration in 1970, so I’m not sure why the bricks look quite so old, unless they moved the bricks with it. A quick search lets me know that Metropolitan bricks are a favorite of brick enthusiasts. Here is an entry about them from a blog called Brickfrog (tagline: “All brick, all the time”). Sidewalk fan blog: meet brick fan blog. While this is my first foray into pictures of bricks, Brickfrog already has a few entries about sidewalk markers. Brickfrog’s sidewalk markers are from the Boston area, and are of a kind unknown in Lansing: metal plaques actually set into the concrete. I have seen pictures of these in a few big cities, but have never seen one myself.

The Metropolitan Block Co. dates back to 1866 and produced a lot of the country’s street paving bricks starting in the 1890s. They were, and still are, in Canton, Ohio. They currently call themselves Metrobrick. Amusingly, they manufacture at least two different varieties of bricks that are pre-distressed in order to make them look old, an attempt to avoid the problem that brand-new bricks always look too perfect and thus fake.