I was surprised to notice this pair of stamps on my walk tonight because I had assumed all the stamps on this block, in front of Feldman Chevrolet (the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Lasalle Court and Detroit Street), were from the same year. These are harder to read than the others but they are presumably also Christman Co. stamps. The ones on the east end of the block are all 1960.
These are on the west end of the block and, like the others, are stamped head to head. The oddity is that these have two different dates, 1954 and 1955. Bud Kouts bought the dealership in 1954 and it continued to bear his name until the 2010s sometime.
This one gives me a lot to write about, almost all of it about cars. Out in front of Feldman Chevrolet are several of these neatly-inscribed marks from The Christman Co. Builders, all dated 1960, and that got me thinking about what this stretch of pavement was like in 1960. Since I moved to Lansing in 1999 this – the corridor on either side of the US-127 overpass – has been seen as a bleak, forsaken stretch of Michigan Avenue. But in 1960 the nearby Frandor was a new, shiny, ultra-modern shopping center, instead of a vast plain of traffic and sadness fronted by a dead Sears.
Christman apparently laid this entire stretch of sidewalk alongside the dealership. Their stamp appears back-to-back like this, every few slabs.
In those days, this was Bud Kouts Chevrolet. Bud Kouts had bought the dealership in 1954, prior to which it had been called Wolverine Chevrolet. Wolverine had originally been located in downtown Lansing. Capital Gains magazine says that it moved “just after World War II,” and the Lansing property records show the current dealership office as dating to 1946, though it has been renovated into unrecognizability.
The Iding family purchased Bud Kouts in 1977, but the name must have carried a good reputation, because the Idings kept it until they sold the business in 2014 to established Detroit-area dealer Feldman. In turn Feldman branded itself as “Feldman’s Bud Kouts Chevrolet” for a few years, though that seems to have ended at some point. I notice that the business property ownership, according to Lansing records, is still in the hands of “Feldkouts LLC.”
Looking east on Michigan Avenue. This stretch of sidewalk has all been stamped at regular intervals.
So this bit of pavement was laid in what must have been a strikingly different Michigan Avenue corridor, yet in front of a business that still had many more years ahead of than behind it.
The stamps in my above photo appear on the two nearest slabs shown here.
As for Christman Co., they have done even better than Wolverine Chevy. They were established in 1894 in South Bend, Indiana and today have numerous offices in various states. Their Lansing office, still downtown, opened in 1919, though by then they had already done major projects for both MSU (then MAC) and Olds. In 1920 they built the Verlinden Street plant for Durant, later bought by GM and known formally as Lansing Car Assembly Plant #6 or colloquially, Fisher Body. The very last Oldsmobile was built there. I remember hearing about its demolition, which happened in 2007, but I was too absorbed in personal crisis to pay it as much attention as I now wish I had.
