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Leslie St., C. Fletcher, 1962

These handwritten stamps are a little way up the street from the handwritten C.H. Peel, but in this case I can be quite confident they are contractor’s marks from the fact that there are two of them paired on either end of a stretch of sidewalk, as a contractor would do to mark the beginning and end of the work they were responsible for. This is on the west side of the 400 block of Leslie Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.

Sorry the photos are dark. I have been taking my walks at night lately to view Christmas lights, and also because it’s hard to take them during the day when the day is about ten minutes long.

In these (not very good) photos it is hard to tell that the first letter is a C, but I’ve seen it by daylight and know that it is. My usual tricks didn’t bring me any joy. I couldn’t find out anything at all about C. Fletcher.

Hard to read under the flash but there is another “C Fletcher” here on a block that has been patched to try to fix the tripping hazard. There are a lot of uneven sidewalk blocks on the east side, often with this kind of nearly useless fix applied.
The above mark is near the bottom of this photo, though not visible in the darkness.

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Leslie St., C.H. Peel, 1961

This handwritten mark is on the west side of Leslie Street’s 500 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. Is it a contractor’s mark, or graffiti? It could easily be either, but guess is the former, based on its placement.

I can’t seem to find out anything about C.H. Peel, either as a contractor or as a person, but my guess is that this is either Charles Hubert Peel or his son Charles H. Peel Jr. Both lived (and died) in Lansing according to Find A Grave, and both were plausible ages in 1961. The father lived 1907-1988 and the son lived 1932-1988. Sadly, they died close together, first Charles Jr. in May 1988 and then Charles Sr. in November that year.

Elizabeth is in view ahead; the stamp is close to the corner.

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Leslie St., sidewalk split

No stamp here, just an oddity. The sidewalk at the southwest corner of Leslie and Malcolm X Streets splits. What is presumably the original sidewalk heads inconveniently away from the intersection, so a new strip (asphalt, not proper sidewalk) has been added that better follows the curve of Malcolm X.

I assume that the concrete sidewalk follows the original alignment of Malcolm X, when it was Main Street, and before it got moved around during the construction of I-496. The house directly across Leslie, which the concrete sidewalk seems to aim at, was only built in 2005.

This isn’t the only oddity in the vicinity. The nearby houses violate my sense of orderliness, as they don’t follow Lansing’s code for house numbering (which is usually very well observed). For some reason, house numbers to the south jump abruptly from 910 to 948. Blocks usually top out at 37.

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Leslie St., E.R. Premoe, 1988

I found this nice example of an E.R. Premoe stamp, and a less nice amount of broken glass, on the sidewalk on the east side of Leslie Street between Elizabeth and the dead end above I-496.

The stamp is in front of a vacant lot. The house on the lot was demolished in 2014.

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Leslie St., DPW, 1941

This faded 1941 Department of Public Works stamp is on the east side of Leslie Street’s 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.

See, I told you Lansing doesn’t enforce the code about what you can plant on the parkway. No “day lily tickets” in this town!

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Leslie St., S.C. Env., 2016

I went to do some more exploring of Urbandale today, and had some nice weather for it. These stamps are on the east side of Leslie Street between Elizabeth and the 496 dead end, in front of a vacant lot. (I’ve mentioned before that Urbandale has a lot of vacant lots.) I haven’t been able to figure out who “S.C. Env.” is, so if you know, please leave a comment.

The southern stamp.

The odd thing about this one is that it’s one long pour, without any separation of blocks. I haven’t seen that before.

The northern stamp. It was filled with water due to the recent thaw.
Looking south on Leslie.

Update 4/19/21: I figured out who SC Env. is!

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Leslie St., Cantu & Sons, 1988

Yes, it’s the blog’s bread and butter, a Cantu & Sons stamp. It must have been a real sight to see so many sidewalks around the east side worked on at (almost) the same time in 1987-88. I wonder why the city did such a huge sidewalk replacement project then?

Note the imprint of the YakTrax I’ve been wearing over my boots ever since I took a spill on a patch of ice and cracked my head on the pavement.

Anyway, I didn’t have much choice. Even most of the sidewalks that had been cleared after last night’s snowstorm had another fine layer of snow on them. Luckily I could make out the white shadow of a stamp in order to know where to brush the pavement off with my mitten.

Looking south on Leslie.

I walked this way because this house still has long strings of lights on their fences, stretching impressively along the west side of the 400 block of Leslie, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. They flash and twinkle and on a cold winter night like this, I’m sure glad they’re still around.

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Leslie St., Trendel, 1956

It’s nice to be back in the land of milk and honey and abundant stamps. I’m struck once again by how much more common they are in Lansing than Albion. Our sidewalks are lousy with them, and I mean that in the best possible way.

This pair is on the east side of Leslie Street’s 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. They appear to be handwritten. Unfortunately, I have no information about Trendel.

Looking south on Leslie. The northern one of the pair is just visible at the bottom of the photo.
The southern stamp of the pair, which faces the opposite direction to the northern one, as is typical of paired stamps.

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Leslie St., Maxwell Const., 2000

I had to walk late again tonight between work and a rain shower that took up my last hour of daylight time, so it’s lucky that I ran across a well-lit stamp I haven’t done yet. This one is on the west side of Leslie Street, north of Kalamazoo and just south of Stanley Court. (“Stanley who?”) Stanley Court is a narrow, one-block street between Leslie and Shepard which avoids being one of the nameless alleys that thread through many neighborhood blocks merely because a half dozen houses do actually face it. It’s kind of an oddity since it is almost, but not quite, level with Eureka Street, which starts a couple of blocks further west.

I like how it appears to have a bolt of lightning through it.

Anyway, back to the stamp. I can find two Maxwell Const[ruction] companies in Michigan, one in Detroit and one in Lennon. I know the small town of Lennon in part because there is a delightful concrete statuary business there called Krupp’s Novelty Shop, and I bought the rabbit statue in my front garden there. Maxwell of Lennon has no Web presence, but according to Angie’s List they were founded in 2005, so that would rule them out. Maxwell of Detroit has a slick Web site and from that I learn they were founded in 2012. I suppose whatever Maxwell Construction this was, they are no longer in business.

Looking south on Leslie. The stamp is in front of a handsome American foursquare home with an interesting raised garden bed around the porch.