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E. Michigan Ave., Isabella Corp., 2016

This stamp, found on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Clifford and Lathrop, has many twins along this stretch. I took a photo of it mainly to showcase the sad, abandoned storefront it’s in front of.

The stamp in context (near the center bottom of the photo), facing east toward Lathrop Street.

The City Pulse made this building its Eyesore of the Week on August 29, 2019, writing, “The storefront housed Rapid Printing, Rapid Publications & Advertising and finally Michigan Avenue Printing. Its last Facebook post dates from January 2014 and the business seems to have collected dust since then, with printing equipment visible from the window.” I’m not entirely sure it did close in 2014. The evidence is ambiguous: the building sold in 2014 to its current owner, but a Google street view from August 2015 shows a seemingly lit “OPEN” sign in the front window, though the sign over the awning is gone. It is definitely gone by the time of the next street view picture in August 2016.

A west-facing view of the abandoned storefront.

A [Lansing] State Journal clipping from December 13, 1935, shows an advertisement for Trilby bath soap which reveals that the address was currently an A&P. In the early 1970s it was apparently an upholstery shop.

I love that old-fashioned sign art.

The front windows are uncovered for anyone to peer in, and it’s a bizarre sight. A copy machine is still sitting in there along with other office equipment, and a bulletin board just inside the window has faded business cards and advertisements. There is a desiccated potted plant just inside the door that can be made out, already dead, in the August 2015 street view images.

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E. Michigan Ave., Isabella Corp., 2016

This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Shepard and Leslie. It’s in front of one of the various old homes, mostly American Foursquares, that have been converted to retail. This is a particularly old house – 1880, according to the city’s records. The most recent business here was Kimlan Flowers and Gifts, but it has been out of business as long as I can remember, the awning out front getting more and more tattered until finally the last remnants of the cover on it were removed. The sign offering it for sale or lease has been there at least ten years.

I have found surprisingly little about the history of the property. The earliest reference I can find to a business at the address was in the 1970s, when it was Better Properties, Inc., a real estate business. Better Properties sold it in 1995, but in the the city records, the field that should say whom it was sold to is blank. They have an undated photo of the business as ACD Computers (the predecessor of internet provider ACD.net), which I assume came between the Better Properties and Kimlan eras.

The stamp is nothing too special. There are a lot of Isabella Corp. stamps from around 2016 on this stretch of Michigan Avenue.

The stamp is outside the frame here, but located in front of the front steps of the house.
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E. Michigan Ave., Isabella Corp., 2016

There is a squat brick storefront, built in the 1950s but attached to a rambling older house behind it, on the north side of East Michigan Avenue at the east corner of Custer. It currently houses the Applause Salon. I don’t know what was in it before that, only that in the 1960s it was Stasi Hair Fashions, a wig shop. Out front is this stamp.

The sidewalk also hosts a bit of graffiti from Lisa W. of the salon. The building and the house are currently owned by a Lisa and Jon W., so I assume Lisa is the owner. (They don’t live in the house, though. They apparently rent it out, disappointing me in my desire to see an old fashioned owner-resident situation.)

The stamp is on the block blow and to the left of the fire hydrant.

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E. Michigan Ave., Isabella Corp., 2016

I walked out to the neighborhood I call Eastmost in order to collect a stamp I’d noted on some previous outing. I was foiled in this plan by a layer of snow covering the area where I believed the stamp to be. I gave up and started walking back. It was snowing, and even the relatively clear areas were being steadily covered. I decided I had better stop at the first sidewalk I came to that had a light coating and get to work finding something there.

I love how it looks when the snow fills in the stamp.

So that’s what I did. This Isabella Corp. stamp is in front of a pawn shop (it just calls itself “SECOND HAND STORE” on the awning, though the Internet tells me it’s properly H & M Discount Second Hand Store) on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Francis and Foster. Before the building was H & M, it was another, very similar-looking pawn shop. It was built in 1952 and its first occupant seems to have been Associates Discount Corp. I went to find out more about them and Googling their name got me pages of caselaw references – usually them suing someone but occasionally someone suing them. I learned that they were an auto finance company, so apparently the building has stayed in the loan business.

I walked along this stretch of Michigan dragging a boot at the top and bottom of each sidewalk slab until I uncovered something. I wonder what the next person to walk by made of it.

Prior to becoming Associates Discount Corp., the address belonged to Jack Royeton Inc., a Kaiser-Frazer car dealer. Once upon a time, Eastmost was the dealership district. It’s amazing to think what it that must have been like.

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W. Michigan Ave., Isabella Corp., 2016

It’s another 2016 stamp today, on the north side of West Michigan Avenue just south of Capitol, in front of Lansing City Hall. There are paired stamps on either end of a short run of new sidewalk.

Looking north on West Michigan. There is the Capitol, of course, and the State Holiday Tree on the left.

City Hall is a beautiful, mid-century modern building, evocative of a prosperous time in the city. I am very fond of it, which might put me in the minority (many residents seem to consider it ugly). The city has not always been a good custodian of it and has been trying to get rid of it. One of the last acts of Virg Bernero’s mayoral administration was to broker a deal to sell it for renovation into a hotel, with the plan being to move City Hall into the former Lansing State Journal building. The Schor administration put the brakes on that, leaving City Hall to continue indefinitely in its state of deferred maintenance.

The northern stamp.

I checked the copious pavement all around City Hall in hope of finding a stamp from its glory days, but to my surprise and disappointment, the only stamps I found were these new ones from Isabella Corp.

Lansing City Hall. This photo was taken from the approximate site of the northern stamp.
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E. Michigan Ave., Isabella Corp., 2016

This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Regent and Clemens. Isabella Corporation is based in Mount Pleasant, which is in Isabella County. Their business address is on Commerce Street. Despite the fact that I have worked in Mount Pleasant for fifteen years, I don’t know where that is without looking it up. As a commuter, I really only know the area around my workplace and a couple of places that co-workers like to gather. I think this might be the furthest out of town any of the contractors have been from, among those I could identify. Mount Pleasant, as I very well know, is around an hour’s drive away.

The stamp is in front of the building with the front ramp pictured below. It’s a big old (1916) American Foursquare house that has been converted to an office at some point. Such houses are common on this stretch of Michigan.

Looking west on Michigan Avenue at dusk. The Little Free Library and “take/leave” boxes belong to the office (a similar house) outside the frame to the left.

I’m not sure what, if anything, is in the house right now. I still think of it as “where the anarchist bookstore used to be” even though that is very long gone and was there only briefly. I have memories of walking home from the Michigan and Clemens bus stop after work, passing the Brighter Days Infoshop. I never went in there, but I remember people often seemed to be hanging around on the porch, which was open at the time. (I think it looked a lot better that way.) In my memory, this spans a greater time than in reality. In fact, I was very surprised when I discovered that Brighter Days opened in August 2003 and was closed by early July 2004. The building spent much longer as a chiropractor’s office and yet for some reason that’s not what’s lodged in my memory.