The work they were getting ready for on the 1700-1800 blocks of East Kalamazoo Street – as discussed in my last entry – and as I predicted, they have started tearing out chunks of sidewalk. I’ll have to check again in daylight, but I believe that this stretch, located outside the former Lucky’s (later Pure Options, now vacant), took out a pair of Cantu & Sons 1987 stamps.
That’s no great loss, I suppose, given how common those stamps are on the east side, but it did cause me to comment to my husband about how the stamps I catalog here are “ephemeral.” Then I corrected myself, “Actually, I guess they’re not all that ephemeral,” and he laughed and agreed. We were both thinking of how old many of them are; it’s quite common to find ones from the 1920s, and not all that hard to find ones that are earlier, as I soon found out when I started making an effort to record them. Still, I suppose what I meant is that any of them could be gone at any time, and there’s no predicting when. That’s why I’m glad I have made an effort to photograph so many.
I know, I know, it’s a plain old Cantu & Sons 1987. They’re everywhere. I can’t help it; there was a dusting of snow over almost everything and I got desperate and took something I could actually see, if barely. There is a pair of them in front of StateSide Wellness, on the south side of East Kalamazoo Street between Regent and Clemens. They are very worn, almost certainly due to being next to the building’s driveway.
A very, very worn stamp. This is the eastern of the two.
I’m still not quite used to the place being a marijuana dispensary, as it recently remade itself. When I moved to town, it had been Lucky’s Market, a convenience store. I thought it was nice having a shop close by my house in case I ran out of pop, though it was pretty disorderly inside, had an off-kilter selection, and took only cash. I gathered that it had a bit of a reputation on the east side. Someone in my pinball league once said to me, “You know, they used to sell little balls of steel wool there for a dime each.” My husband likes to say that it became much more reputable as a pot shop than it was as a convenience store. I will admit that it looks neater and does a better job shoveling its sidewalk.
This is the western of the pair. Sorry it’s not a better photo, but I had to take it in a hurry as I was in the way of traffic. The place was positively jumping. They have a recreational permit now too, so…
Another longtime resident told me that she remembered when it had been a fried chicken place. She said people used to like to get their fried chicken there and then eat it while doing laundry next door. (The place next door is now a convenience store – for a long time there were two of them side by side taking up that side of the block – but had been a coin laundry before I moved to town.) I looked into it, and it appears it was one of several Lansing locations of Famous Recipe Chicken (sometimes called Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken). It seems to have been that from around 1966 to 1991, so during the era of these stamps. After that, it seems to have been something called Steak 2 U for a while before becoming Lucky’s in 1994.
It’s a far less sketchy looking building now, but it sure is drab as heck, with that dark gray, corrugated siding.
The building was built in 1956. While Lucky’s was shedding its old cladding and plastic roof trim (during the transformation to StateSide Wellness) we got a chance to see the building naked. It was a surprisingly tiny pillbox of a building made of concrete block. This revealed bricked-over remnants of garage bay doors, suggesting an early existence as a service station.
