As has been noted here before, I like the way that sidewalk stamps lend texture to the snow when it has freshly fallen on the sidewalk. So, since it was too snowy to find anything interesting tonight, enjoy a couple of glamour shots. No doubt this is a Cantu & Sons stamp, probably from 1987 or 1988, but I didn’t want to disturb the snow to find out. This is from the east side of Regent Street just north of Kalamazoo.
This stamp is from Lathrop Street south of Elizabeth, on the west side of the street. The sidewalk ends here. On the east side of the street it continues, as Lathrop curves around to meet Allen. Unlike other streets nearby that were truncated by the construction of I-496 in the late 1960s, Lathrop would always have ended more or less here, because Stabler Park lay to the south. The turn that joins Lathrop to Allen is now a bit diagonal, in parallel to 496, whereas it used to be more squared off (as I can see on HistoricAerials.com). The result is that while the last house on the east side has survived, the last two on the west side were 496 casualties.
The stamp is on the very last piece of sidewalk on the west side, and I find it odd that it extends a little past the driveway for no apparent reason. Since it’s dated 1988, it was laid long after any houses existed to the south. My guess is that it marks the lot line. The doomed house that used to be next door to this one, 628 Lathrop, sold in 1957 for $6,800 cash. The real estate card notes that it had a dark room in the basement.
This is from the very last, sad-looking piece of sidewalk on the west side of the south end of South Francis Avenue, in the beleaguered Urbandale neighborhood. The sidewalk peters out at the southern end of the southernmost house’s lot. Unlike on the other side of the street which has had its sidewalk removed, it appears that the sidewalk may always have ended here, based on there being no trace of it in the 2007 Google Street View. The stamp looks off-center, but only because the sidewalk is sinking into the earth on the left.
Oddly, the vacant land south of here (at least part of which is occupied by an urban farm) is owned by the City of Lansing Parks and Recreation Department. A lot of parcels on the southernmost blocks of Urbandale are owned by the city or the county, but the puzzling part is what the Parks Department’s involvement is in this. I haven’t seen that in other city-owned lots. The boundary sketch of it in the city records show a fairly large piece of land that stretches way out to the west behind Foster Avenue, where it forms an L-shape around something labeled “DNR Polluted Site.” I’d like to know more about that, too.
Are you tired of extremely faint stamps from Horton Avenue yet? Well, life is hard. This is a very nearly invisible stamp that I noticed only because I have started actively looking at “curb walks” for stamps. (I don’t know what I am supposed to call them, but “curb walk” is my name for little bits of sidewalk that run across someone’s extension to the curb, and “extension” is my name for what Lansing’s municipal code calls a “parkway”). This one is on the east side of Horton Avenue (yes Avenue, I keep forgetting that it’s an Avenue and not a Street, Google Maps notwithstanding) between Michigan and Jerome.
I believe it may be a Cantu & Sons stamp, specifically the “Cantu & Sons Cement Cont” variety, because I can make out part of the word “cement” in the lower row of the stamp, and an N above it in the upper row. The date is a lost cause.
This stamp, from the south side of Marcus Street between Clemens and Fairview, is a typical example of a Cantu & Sons stamp with the 1987 date corrected to 1988. There are a lot of ones like that around the neighborhood. The real reason I photographed it, though, was the odd graffiti, added as though an addendum to the contractor stamp: “The Butterfly.”
There is something else scrawled in the corner to the left, but I wasn’t able to make it out in the current light.
In case you thought this blog had strayed too far from its roots, here’s a Cantu & Sons 1988 stamp. I can tell this the faded date is 1988 mainly because I can see the extra line they were in the habit of putting in to change the 7 to an 8 before they finally got around to getting a 1988 stamp. The stamp is in front of the only house that faces the 1900 block of Prospect Street. It’s on the south side of Prospect Street west of Clemens.
When I was new in town I very often had to walk home from the bus stop at Michigan and Clemens, usually by walking south on Clemens and then west on Kalamazoo. This walk got so dull from repetition that I wished I could vary it, and was disappointed by the abrupt disappearance of Prospect west of Clemens. (It then reappears at Allen Street.) There is just a little stub end of Prospect that continues a short distance past the intersection, serving the single house to the south, a driveway to the north, and straight ahead… this.
I was very puzzled by this stark, concrete block building. What is it doing here? Who does it belong to? It looks out of place and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the house next to it or anything else on Prospect. I always wondered about it but never thought to try to figure it out until I started all this walking and blogging. That’s when I realized that it might belong to a house on the next street west, that is, Regent Street.
And so it does. I worked out that it belongs to a house on Regent Street and that the city has it accounted as a garage, built 1910, the same year as the house. But the supposed garage is bigger than the house, 1,660 square feet versus 1,120. Viewed from the house side, it appears that there is a normal (for the neighborhood) single-car garage with painted siding attached to it up front, which the city labels “shed” in their sketch of the property. The whole setup is very odd. There must be a story behind this.
This stamp is on the west side of Regent Street just about midway between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. It’s in front of the same house as this J. Wilson stamp. The house itself is a cute little Dutch colonial. A decade-plus ago, I had to have part of my chimney rebuilt, and the mason who did it lived in this house. He said, “You know I’ll do a good job because I’ll have to look at it.” In fact, he did do a really nice job.
The date appeared to be 1988 when I raked it with my flashlight beam, but now that I look at the photo it seems more like 1987. I will have to look at it in daylight next chance I get.
Nothing much to bring you tonight, so here’s another one of the usual Regent Street suspects, this one on the east side of the 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. It does occur to me that it’s odd that there are both 1987 and 1988 stamps from Cantu on the same blocks. I have been assuming that there was a big, mass sidewalk replacement project that Cantu got the contract for, and that it took them more than one year to do it. I would have thought they would do one block or street at a time, however, and that all the ones in one area would be the same year. Instead the ’87s and a couple of different styles of ’88s are intermixed.
I bet you think this is the same stamp I did yesterday, since this one is also on the east side of Regent Street’s 400 block between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. Wrong! This one is… a couple of lots over. But you know this one is different because it’s next to my nemesis, the Super Bright Streetlight.
A few years ago, someone apparently ran a car into the old one that stood here and it broke into three pieces. It was lying on the yard next door for a little while before it was cleared away, and during that time I discovered that the globe is not, as I had always assumed, glass, but instead a surprisingly light piece of plastic that looks rather cheap up close. I felt the scales fall from my eyes and I have never looked at the street lamps in the city the same way again.
When they replaced it, the new one was worse in two ways. It never got painted white to match the other streetlights in the area. Instead it is just rust colored, and in fact the color seems to be authentic rust, although my father has the minority opinion that it’s actually primer. Every time I see it, I think of someone insulting a car in Grease: “What color is that, candy apple primer?”
The other way is that instead of the dimmer, yellow sodium appearance, it has been given an LED makeover and is now a bluish-white color, brighter than the sun. Note how it appears to be going supernova in my photo.
For a while I cursed the driver who subjected my block to this new lamp, but soon the LED issue will be moot, because they are planning to comprehensively replace all the lamps with LEDs in this neighborhood by 2022.
I took this in the morning (the other morning, the one you might call “yesterday morning” if you have subsequently slept) before a day at Cedar Point. It’s on the east side of Regent Street’s 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Michigan.
We got into automotive shenanigans on the way home that will probably be funny to retell someday, but that day isn’t today and I’m not awake enough in any case. OK, one tidbit: I ended up walking home from the US-127 exit at Kalmazoo through two-foot-plus deep water at 3:30 am and then getting sprayed by a skunk.
