I was at the Turner-Dodge House for the Fairy Tale Festival on Saturday, and I noticed this H & C stamp on the sidewalk that leads from the rear of the house to the River Trail. It’s a little hard to read the date, but I think it is 2004.
On Friday I went out to photograph the 1924 camelback bridge over the Red Cedar River in Okemos, as I had heard it was slated for demolition on Monday. Everything I might say about the loss of the bridge and the general destruction of the town of Okemos has been said first and better by HistoricBridges.org. Interestingly, a contributor to that site was out documenting the bridge on Tuesday, and they report that demolition has not started and it is still carrying traffic, with an unknown actual demolition date.
While I was there I took a couple of photos of sidewalk stamps in the vicinity of the bridge, which is on the east side of Okemos Road between Mount Hope Road and Clinton Street. This one is on the north end of the bridge in front of Ferguson Park. As muddy and worn as it is, it appears to say “HTC,” but I believe it is an H & C stamp, like one of similar vintage I photographed in front of the Meridian Mall.
I had business at the Meridian Mall today, so I thought I would do my first Meridian Township stamp, and get one in front of the mall. To that end I started look on Google Street View, which I sometimes do to scout a spot before walking there. It’s often possible to see stamps and even sometimes possible to read them. I was disappointed that it didn’t look like there were any stamps to be found near the front entrance. That got me wondering whether Meridian Township has the same rule about sidewalk stamping as the city of Lansing – that is, that sidewalks must be stamped with the name of the contractor and the date. I went to the Meridian Township code, but there it only said that sidewalks must be constructed according to the specifications of the Director of Public Works and Engineering. I dug around a little on the Meridian Township Web site until I found those specifications. Regarding stamping, they state:
At each end of the pour, or at least every 80’, the sidewalk/pathway must be imprinted with the contractor’s name and date stamp. The letters of the stamp shall be 1 1⁄2” high.
Meridian Township Department of Public Works
I’m surprised it specifies an exact height for the letters instead of “at least” an inch and a half as it says in Lansing’s code. It is also more specific about how frequent the stamps should be. Nevertheless, they seem infrequent in the vicinity of the mall.
Sidewalks themselves get short shrift around the mall, probably unsurprisingly, but irritatingly nonetheless. I set out to walk the outside edge of the mall and found that a sidewalk at the edge of the building exists only intermittently, mostly around the doors. The longest unbroken stretch of sidewalk is around the Macy’s wing. None of it is stamped. There is no sidewalk at all around the mall’s perimeter road. I only found one place where the public sidewalk even offers a pedestrian entrance to the mall, and it’s on the Marsh Road side rather than near the front entrance on Grand River. Having one lonely access path is so inadequate that it hardly seems worth having any at all. It makes me wonder if the township required them to have pedestrian access when they built the mall so they complied in the stingiest manner possible.
It’s near that access sidewalk that I found a stamp. I had spotted it on Google Street View so I knew it was there, and a couple more like it, though those were hidden by snow at the moment. The contractor is probably H & C Earthworks and Construction of Bath Township, about which I can’t find much information.
