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.
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.)
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 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 was visiting family in Albion and took a walk in the neighborhood near Victory and Reiger Parks. On either side of Allen Street, on the corner of East Erie, I noticed two orphaned driveway aprons. I see these all the time in my neighborhood in Lansing, serving as a marker of where a house has been torn down.
The one on the east side of Allen has crumbling concrete barriers in it, suggesting a concern that people would drive into the vacant lot, if not an actual occurrence. Across the way, its neighbor does not have barriers, but also points to a vacant lot. (Oddly, a Google street view from 2012 shows the west driveway with the concrete barriers and none on the east driveway.) The empty lots are both quite large.
The properties evidently faced Erie, based on the city records which show them to have Erie addresses. A crumbling, low brick wall edges the front of the eastern property, with a portal showing where the front entrance may have been placed.
According to the city records, the properties were both sold (cheaply) by Colchester Properties to Albion College in 2007. I’m not sure what the college’s interest was in them. Perhaps they wanted to prevent them from becoming (or remaining) eyesores, since they are close to campus.
“Huntley” is inscribed on the front walk of a house on the east side of South Fairview Avenue, between Elizabeth and Harton. The east side of this block – the 600 block – is entirely populated by nearly identical little Cape Cods. They are around 600 square feet and, according to the city, one-and-a-quarter stories. There are actually two different styles that alternate, one with a symmetrical front consisting of two windows and a centered door, the other with a single window and a door to one side. There are nine of these houses; a tenth on the corner of Harton was demolished in 2015. There is also another one just south of Harton, the only house on the east side of the 700 block. Curiously, they were built in 1941 and 1942, with the southern half of the houses having the later year. That’s a strange time to be building houses.
Despite their conformity, I really like them. Maybe it’s the coziness of a row of little cottages all lined up, or maybe it’s the way that their outline looks like the Platonic form of a house, or at least a child’s drawing of one.
I haven’t been able to determine who Huntley was, though I presume a past resident of the house. While I can find references in old newspapers to people named Huntley living in Lansing, without addresses attached to them, I have no way to guess which, if any, this Huntley might have been.
I habitually watch the sidewalk when I’m walking around the neighborhood so that I can notice sidewalk stamps, but now that I’ve mined the east side so thoroughly, I’ve started to branch out and also look at any front walks I pass. Today I noticed these two stamps on the west side of South Foster Avenue between Michigan and Prospect.
There are two walks leading up to this house, one being the main front walk to the porch, and the other being a smaller path leading around to the back of the house. I noticed the one on the smaller path first and thought the date was 1937, but wasn’t entirely sure, as it could also have been 1987.
Then I saw the stamp on the front walk, which is a much clearer 1937. I can’t be totally sure they are from the same contractor, since they do look a bit different, but that might just be due to uneven wear. It seems likely they were done at the same time. They don’t date to the construction of the house; that was back in 1910.
They are tantalizingly close to legible, but unfortunately I can only pick out a few letters.
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.
No sidewalk for you today; in fact there is no sidewalk at all on this block, Mifflin Avenue between Kalamazoo and Marcus. Instead, here is a little relic that always makes me a bit sad: the stairs to a long-gone house. (I’m not sure how long gone, but it was already gone by the earliest Google street views in 2007.)
There is only one house remaining on this (west) side of the block, and that one is so obscured by tree cover that it is hard to see. There are a few more houses on the other side, but like much of the Urbandale neighborhood, this is a sparsely-occupied block, and one that is likely to continue depopulating.
This is a rather plain East Jordan Iron Works manhole cover, at a property on the west side of South Clemens Avenue between Prospect and Michigan. What’s odd about it, and piqued my interest, is that it’s situated within someone’s front walk. In fact, the walk seems to widen there to accommodate it.
I pass this house all the time, on the east side of South Clemens Avenue between Michigan and Prospect. Its front walk is marked “KLH” and it is so neat and central that I have come to think of it as the house’s monogram.
It seems that it may be the mark of KLH Contracting, a home remodeling company in Pinckney. Unfortunately, their web site doesn’t give a company history. Open Corporates has an incorporation date of February 3, 2016.
This one is on the front walk of a house on the north side of Jerome Street between Custer and Rumsey. Unfortunately it is not quite legible in full. The name appears to be two initials and then a surname. The surname looks like it starts with “Look-” but might actually be “Locke” as I can find evidence of a family with that name in Lansing in this time period. The line underneath that is totally illegible. I had no joy trying to find any contractor matching these details. At least the date is clear enough.
