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S. Fairview Ave (Alley), graffiti, 2003

Bored with all my usual walks around the east side, I decided to walk through one of the many alleys that run north-south in between the neighborhood streets. Some houses have their garages facing the alley, others facing the street; I don’t know why they are not consistent or what led to preferring one over the other. I have rarely if ever seen the backs of all these houses before, so it was a strange and disorienting experience, which served to make my walk a lot more interesting. The alley I chose was between South Clemens and Fairview Avenues, and is asphalt. There is obviously no sidewalk, but I began checking some of the driveway entrances for stamps. To be honest, all the garages back there looked pretty tired, and in a couple of places there were mysterious concrete pads where a garage or shed was probably demolished, so I wondered how old any stamps I found would be. I didn’t find any, but I did find this piece of graffiti.

Was “Brain” a nickname, or did Brian somehow manage to misspell his own name? I’m guessing the latter, but what do you think?

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Lasalle Gardens, Able Concrete, 2019

My apologies for disappearing last week (if anyone noticed). It’s gotten warm enough to see the sidewalks again so here’s a fairly uneventful curiosity I noticed over in the Midway subdivision: two Able Concrete stamps, done the same year, but in two different styles.

The semicircular one is on the house’s driveway, and the plain one is on the front walk. I have to guess they were done on two different occasions, because the alternative is that they brought two different stamps with them just for variety’s sake. As fun as that idea is, it doesn’t seem likely.

This is on the north side of Lasalle Gardens between Kipling and Midvale.

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N. Foster Ave., Louis Guinette, 1928

I’m kicking off the fourth year of the blog in style, with a brand new stamp, and a beautiful one. Just look at that clear impression and the artistic vignette effect! I just stumbled across this yesterday on someone’s driveway on west side of North Foster Avenue between Michigan and Vine, which is a block I walk all the time.

Every time I decide that I must have found every unique stamp on the east side something like this happens.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything out about Louis Guinette. Searching for his name gets me no hits in the State Journal, and Find a Grave doesn’t even know of a grave anywhere in Michigan for someone named Louis Guinette.

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Rumsey Ave., Don Plantz, 2020

Here’s a new stamp for the blog. Unfortunately I can’t tell you much about it that isn’t right there on the tin. Don Plantz Concrete, LLC, has no Web site that I can find, but OpenCorporates says it was incorporated in 2018 in East Lansing, and it seems to still be active.

This stamp is on the driveway of a house on the west side of Rumsey Avenue’s northernmost block.

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S. Hayford Ave., curious driveway

This blog probably has the highest post-to-readership ratio out there, since I think only my husband reads it. Nevertheless, I feel like I have to start off by apologizing that this is not even slightly about sidewalks. It’s one of those tidbits I tag as “curiosities”: things around the neighborhood that make me wonder, “Now why ever was that built that way?” This one is a truly odd driveway belonging to a house on the west side of South Hayford Avenue between Marcus and Harton.

What’s odd about it is the fact that it aims straight at the front of the house. It seems a little unusual for a house in this neighborhood to have been built without a garage. Often if I check into the history of a garageless house I discover that a garage was torn down at some point, probably when it was allowed to get too derelict (as happened with the house next door to me). But even the ones without garages have their driveways sensibly located alongside the house, not running right up to the front door.

You would be forgiven for thinking it was just an abnormally wide front walk, but the placement of the driveway apron makes it clear that it is indeed intended to be the driveway. I can’t fathom what led to such a strange choice. My usual source for older photos of houses, CADL’s Belon Real Estate Collection, has nothing on this house; evidently it is one of the rare cases of a house that never changed hands during the time period the collection covers (early 1950s to early 1970s). According to the city records, the house was built in 1940.

Yep, definitely a driveway.
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Prospect St., Washburn Const., 2004

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.
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Downer St., unsigned, 1975

Sometimes I pick an unfamiliar block semi-randomly and divert to it on my way home from work to look for sidewalk stamps. This time I picked Downer Street between Woodruff and Hopkins. There wasn’t much of interest there, but I did find this driveway on the west side of the street. It has a year, 1975, stamped in each corner, but no contractor name. There is a matching driveway stamped with the same date in the corners on Elizabeth Street, undoubtedly the work of the same anonymous contractor.

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Regent St., Illegible

This marking is on a driveway facing the sidewalk, on the west side of the 300 block of Regent Street, between Michigan and Kalamazoo. It’s visible enough to be intriguing, but not visible enough to read. There seem to be two lines of text, with the bottom one more visible.

Please excuse the bit of my fuzzy glove visible. It was a cold day.

The letters that can be most easily made out are “JAM” and I think the next two are “IE,” which made me think “Jamieson.” Unfortunately, that clue didn’t end up unlocking anything for me in my searches. The line above it looks to include “DDY,” but that’s not much to go on. But I have come to realize it is probably actually the names of people who lived in the house at one time: the bottom one is probably just plain Jamie, and perhaps the other one is “Daddy” or “Buddy.”

I could not see the handprints with my eyes at the time, but they have become visible in this photo, which makes it very clear this isn’t a contractor’s mark but a memento.

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E. Michigan Ave., L & L, 2000

This stamp is on a driveway on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Leslie and Horton. It’s what I call a ghost driveway; the house it belonged to was demolished sometime between 2008 and 2011, along with another one next door. It was one of those old houses-turned-businesses that line so much of the Avenue here. The city has an account for a business called “Digital Photo Magic” at this address, indicating delinquent taxes for 1999 and 2000, so they may have been here when this stamp was made. I can’t find much else about the history of the house except that in the 1950s and early ’60s it was home to a real estate agency called Brennan Realty Co.

The sky had an impressive thunderhead in it, off in the distance to the north, and it was crackling with beautiful heat lightning. I’m sorry that doesn’t come through in the photo, but maybe you can add it with your imagination to get a sense of the mood.

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N. Magnolia Ave., driveway marking, undated

This isn’t my usual kind of sidewalk marking, but I got a kick out of it, so here you go. Someone on the east side of North Magnolia Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw has written their house number quite large on their driveway concrete. You’d think this would be more common, actually, but I haven’t seen it before.