They have started to replace the sidewalks that were removed during the recent gas pipeline project on East Kalamazoo Street. This one is near the southeast corner of Kalamazoo and Magnolia. Someday some new resident of the neighborhood will wonder what happened in 2023-24 that so many sidewalks are embossed with those years, just as I once was with Cantu & Sons 1987-88.
I have a silly (and unfortunately blurry) one for you today. Eastlund Concrete stamps are ubiquitous in the neighborhood, but apparently they failed to get a new date stamp for 2023. The 2 has been rubbed out and replaced with a handwritten 3.
This one is on the west side of North Clemens Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw, in front of a cute little house that looks like it got some new walk at the same time as a revamped front walk.
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.
I assume this is graffiti, though the name/date format and the placement almost suggests a handwritten contractor marking. But, for Little Christmas, please enjoy the well-lit house I found it in front of. It’s on the west side of North Hayford Avenue between Fernwood and Saginaw.
This stamp is from the east side of North Clemens Avenue between Michigan and Jerome. T L Contracting isn’t one of the more common stamps in the neighborhood, although I have covered one in the blog before. This block must have been a singleton when it was laid, since it is stamped twice, one facing either way.
It also happens to be in front of a wonderfully decorated house, so I really chose it to showcase some neighborhood holiday lights. Happy holidays to both of my readers!
We finally had a little bit of snow (now long since obliterated by the weather turning warm again) and I took a walk in it to get photos of Christmas lights. I also found some beautiful snow-frosted sidewalk stamps. I love the way snow settles into the lettering; in some cases, as in the B.F. Churchill stamp below, it even makes it more legible.
In honor of the holiday, here are some of the photos I took of Christmas lights on my walk. I have really come to enjoy walking alone in snowy quiet after night falls, stopping to stand in front of Christmas displays and admire them. Driving around to admire lights is nice, and I do that too, but there is something special about the intimacy of doing it on foot. Being a pedestrian is underrated.
Happy holidays from Capital City Sidewalks!
I have been walking Allen and Lathrop Streets a lot recently as they are a hot spot of Christmas lights right now. This cryptic message is on the west side of Allen between Kalamazoo and Marcus.
The date is obvious; what to make of the rest? C-R-U5? That last digit is a 5, right?
There’s actually something else I want to get from Allen Street but by the time I got going tonight it was too dark. That will probably be next time.
On a pleasant early-afternoon walk in search of Halloween decorations, I came across these stamps from a contractor I haven’t noticed before. They are on the west side of Kipling Boulevard between Lasalle and Fernwood. There are two, a short distance apart, which means they probably marked the beginning and end of a section of new concrete.
One of the stamps has a date stamped underneath, though faintly enough that I thought it was undated until I looked at my photo afterward. My phone tends to put a lot of contrast on photos and that popped it out. Curiously, the other stamp has a much clearer but handwritten date.
I don’t know anything about Brown Construction, but I wonder if it is this contractor in Grand Ledge that Yelp reports as closed.
I finally got a chance to walk up to Jerome and Horton to see the bum walk people have been complaining about on the Eastside Facebook group. Several curb cuts along Jerome on Horton and nearby streets have been reconstructed recently, and it does not appear that any of them were stamped by the contractor so that they could take credit (or possibly, in this case, discredit) for their work.
I’m not a sidewalk expert and it’s possible there is nothing wrong with these. The complaint that’s being made is that the approaches are too low, resulting in water pooling around them during heavy rain. To my eyes it did appear that they were lower than the drain at this corner, but again, I can’t be sure. Marking this as a Hall of Shame entry is more to do with the failure to mark them as city code requires.
The work they were getting ready for on the 1700-1800 blocks of East Kalamazoo Street – as discussed in my last entry – and as I predicted, they have started tearing out chunks of sidewalk. I’ll have to check again in daylight, but I believe that this stretch, located outside the former Lucky’s (later Pure Options, now vacant), took out a pair of Cantu & Sons 1987 stamps.
That’s no great loss, I suppose, given how common those stamps are on the east side, but it did cause me to comment to my husband about how the stamps I catalog here are “ephemeral.” Then I corrected myself, “Actually, I guess they’re not all that ephemeral,” and he laughed and agreed. We were both thinking of how old many of them are; it’s quite common to find ones from the 1920s, and not all that hard to find ones that are earlier, as I soon found out when I started making an effort to record them. Still, I suppose what I meant is that any of them could be gone at any time, and there’s no predicting when. That’s why I’m glad I have made an effort to photograph so many.
