I found this faint stamp on a walk leading from the back door of a house facing Allen, on the southwest corner of Allen and Elizabeth Streets. The walk extends diagonally northwest toward Elizabeth.
I can’t make out the name exactly although I think it is [initial] [initial] Buonodono, maybe R.D. I haven’t been able to figure anything out about the contractor. It is undated, but the house was built in 1923 so perhaps it dates to then.
Continuing on Monday’s theme, here is the other street-name stamp that I discovered on a recent evening walk in Albion. It’s at the curved “corner” where Elizabeth Street meets East Erie, informing the pedestrian that this way is Elizabeth. (Presumably there was originally a matching Erie mark, as in Monday’s example, but I wonder if it was on the concrete block closer to Erie, which has obviously been replaced at some point.) I have walked past this many times, but only noticed it on this occasion because the light caught it exactly right; it’s very shallow and worn. I have actually featured this stretch of sidewalk in a previous blog entry due to its interesting curved corner, but as it was winter then, I had no hope of noticing this stamp.
This curved sidewalk at the north end of Elizabeth is not duplicated in any of the nearby residential streets. Those are all squared off and look newer, so perhaps they used to be like this one.
This is an illustration of the two ways the city deals with trip hazards in the sidewalk, on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Shepard and Leslie. The sidewalk slabs are frequently heaved up by trees, and some stretches of sidewalk on the east side resemble obstacle courses as a result. When someone cares enough to report a trip hazard, the city either uses asphalt to make a sort of ramp between the two pieces of walk, or grinds the sidewalk down until the edges are flush again.
The former approach is almost useless in my estimation. The asphalt almost always has a blunt enough edge to be its own trip hazard, and it ends up crumbling and getting even craggier over time. The grinding method works very well, making a wonderfully smooth transition. As a bonus it looks kind of neat, exposing the rock within the concrete and leaving behind an almost polished sheen.
I don’t know how the city decides which approach to use. The asphalt method is described as a “temporary fix,” but I’ve seen ones that have clearly been around for ages. The grinding method “is only appropriate for addressing trip hazards where the sidewalk section is otherwise intact (not cracked or broken),” which could explain why some spots get the asphalt instead, but I have seen plenty of asphalt patches on intact blocks. So I’m not sure why they don’t use the clearly superior grinding method more universally.
I like two things about this front walk on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Shepard and Leslie: the very crisp, angled “1975” in either corner of the front step, and the way the walk forks instead of coming straight forward to the street.
I dislike just one thing about it: the lack of the contractor’s name.
I must have passed this disc, in the sidewalk on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Regent and Clemens, hundreds of times, and yet I’d never noticed it before. For some reason I stopped to look at it this time, thinking it was a groundwater well cover. To my surprise, it is something cooler (at least if you have my temperament): a survey monument, specifically a benchmark.
I don’t know much about survey monuments, but this one seems plainer and less informative than ones I have stumbled on elsewhere. I wonder what is hidden beneath the lid? It appears to be open up if a screw is removed. I also don’t know what the code on the rim means.
I had one of those lucky moments today in which I walked past a previously illegible stamp at a different time of day and it revealed itself to me. It suddenly became apparent that this stamp, previously catalogued as illegible, is in fact from L. Ketchum. Like the other L. Ketchum I’ve found, it looks to be from the 1960s, and if I’m reading it right, 1961.
This illegible stamp is on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Clemens and Fairview, just west of the alley. It doesn’t resemble any stamp that I recognize, but I can’t make out more than couple of letters. It looks to start with a K or B.
The date is also illegible. I can say with fair confidence that one digit is a “6”, but I can’t be sure whether it’s the last digit or the penultimate one, so I can’t even narrow down a decade.
Update 4/28/21: Walking past it in different light, it suddenly jumped out at me that it is an L. Ketchum stamp. The date is almost certainly 1960s, like the other one I’ve found, and I think it’s 1961.
Here’s a faded old Department of Public Works stamp on Elizabeth St., at the southwest corner of Allen and Elizabeth. It’s next to a house that kept my spirits up by leaving their Christmas lights, including a tree on their screened porch, up well past Christmas. I used to walk to Allen specifically because of a few houses on the street that still had lights until the end of January or so.
It’s funny now that I used to think 1920s stamps were a big deal. They’re actually fairly common. It doesn’t stop me from trying to catalogue them all, though. 1930s and later is really where I draw the line and say “I don’t need that one” if it’s not an unusual contractor.
Snow sometimes works against me, and sometimes with me. I was walking along the north side of Elizabeth Street, and just east of Leslie I saw the snow highlighting some of the letters in a worn, old Department of Public Works stamp. I took some snow with my mitten and rubbed it into the rest of the stamp (feeling awkward as I realized a dog walker had seen me do this) and this is what it looked like. I wonder what the next people to walk this way thought of the white highlighting that I had left behind.
This is the same principle behind rubbing chalk or flour into gravestone inscriptions, except unlike those practices (which are very much frowned upon) this won’t cause any harm. A little while later on my walk, on Allen Street, the snow was my friend again. It caused the start of an old-looking stamp that I’ve never seen before to jump out at me. I’ve walked that block many times without noticing it. I got down on the ground and sprinkled some extra snow, rubbing it in to try to make the stamp legible. I couldn’t quite do it. Besides, where the date would have (or should have) been there was a patch of obscuring ice. I added it to my list of places to check again later.
I have thought about trying to do rubbings of the sidewalk as people do with gravestones. Even that practice, though not nearly as harmful as rubbing material into the inscription directly, is controversial. It is said to risk damaging an already old inscription, or at least contribute to wearing it down. It sounds absurd, I suppose, to worry about causing wear to something designed to be walked on for a hundred years. But I treasure these fading markings and don’t want to hasten their illegibility. I have picked up a habit of avoiding walking on them. Maybe I’ll try this method of using aluminum foil, which is supposed to be the most harmless way to read gravestones. If, that is, I can get past how self conscious kneeling in front of someone’s house with a sponge and a roll of Reynolds Wrap is going to make me.
Nothing new or exciting this time, but with fresh snow all over I didn’t have very many options. I walked into Hunter Park, around the paved loop, and back out via Elizabeth Street, stopping to take a picture of this (as usual) undated O & M stamp on one of the last few sidewalk blocks before the dead end. This is on the south side of Elizabeth. I like the deep imprint that makes the borders of the stamper visible.
Elizabeth’s western dead end touches Hunter Park. The sidewalk on both sides just ends without any official trail leading into the park. There is a very well-worn social trail leading from the southern sidewalk toward the pool area. There’s something just a little odd to me about the way the sidewalk goes past the last house’s front porch steps only to end abruptly at the edge of the property when it’s not done being useful yet.
