As part of the recent East Kalamazoo Street construction that also saw a lot of new sidewalk laid, a crosswalk with warning arrows was painted on Kalamazoo at Mifflin Avenue.
Kalamazoo previously had no crosswalks anywhere between Clemens and Howard, a nine-block span. This one is a lot closer to Howard than to Clemens, but it was presumably placed here due to the presence of the Village Party Store. It doesn’t have a light, even a flashing one, but at least it’s something.
This stamp is across Mifflin Avenue from Monday’s, just over the border into Lansing Township on East Kalamazoo Street. Unlike the last one, this one is not a very deep impression, which is a disappointment to a sidewalk observer such as myself. It’s in front of the Village Party Store, a well known convenience and liquor store with its own coin laundry. It’s a staple of the neighborhood, but to the best of my recollection I’ve never been inside.
I was curious about the history of the place and a quick search of old State Journals turned up that from at least 1939-1955 it was the Ellis Food Market as well as the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Ellis. Their advertisements in the 1940s promote their “Special Designated Liquor and Beer Store Hours 7 A. M. to 2 A. M.” These days, the Village Party Store has a bit of a reputation for being in a tough area (though I walk past it at night all the time without incident), so it’s amusing to note that it was already the victim of shenanigans in the 1950s. On July 17, 1954, the State Journal reports that a trio of people from Detroit were “accused of breaking into the Ellis Food market, 2601 E. Kalamazoo st. The burglars were surprised in their car while leaving the establishment after stealing a quantity of liquor but escaped in a wild chase in which several shots were fired at them.”
On June 23, 1967, the State Journal reports that Mrs. Lynell Ellis of this address pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the Uniform Housing Code: “In a warrant signed by housing inspector Ted Tycocki, Mrs. Ellis was charged with not having hot running water and with having improper fuses, hazardous switches and defective electrical fixtures in a house at 521 W. Lenawee St.” I don’t know whether the Food Market was still in operation at that time. By 1983, the address belonged to the Village Party Store.
This is across Mifflin Avenue from the one posted in the last two entries. It’s on the southeast corner of Mifflin and East Kalamazoo Street, in other words, just outside the border of the city of Lansing, making it a rare example of a stamp in Lansing Township. As part of the recent construction on Kalamazoo, they have put in a new curb cut on this side with a single block of pavement. No further sidewalk has been laid yet and I am guessing it won’t be, since there wasn’t any there before, just a ramshackle parking lot that seems to belong to University Foreign Car across the street.
This forlorn half a block of sidewalk is a contender for the saddest sidewalk in Lansing. I’m pretty confident in crowning it the saddest sidewalk on the east side, anyway. It’s the southernmost part of the side of Mifflin Avenue that actually has a sidewalk, which is of course the Lansing (i.e. west) side. The Lansing Township side has none.
The sidewalk here ends a short distance south of the last house, probably at the edge of that house’s lot. Further south from here, across Harton, is the Harton Street Pump Station. North of the last house there are two vacant lots where neighboring houses were torn down. The sidewalk is overgrown and disappearing from the start of the vacant area through to the end.
I nearly had my first sidewalk-blog-related injury taking these photos. Do you see what I suddenly saw as I stood there taking a photo (below) of the very last piece of concrete?
It’s poison ivy. I thought to myself that I was lucky I hadn’t gone any further, but then suddenly I had a bad feeling and turned around to look behind me. I could see more patches of it, some of it actually over the sidewalk such that I would have had to walk through it to get where I was standing. I never had poison ivy in my life until sometime in the last decade, and then I had a bad case of it that lasted six weeks. Now I am usually more careful, but being in the city caused me to let my guard down, foolishly. I was wearing shorts and sandals, so I walked home immediately after taking these photos and scrubbed myself down with Tecnu poison ivy remover. I would have broken out by now if I was going to get it, so either I somehow obliviously dodged it like a baby crawling through a construction zone in a cartoon, or I got all the oil off before I could react.
This stamp is on the west side of Mifflin Avenue between Michigan and Prospect. It could only be on the west side; the east side of Mifflin Avenue has no sidewalk, even though there are residences on both sides. There is (I believe) a clear explanation for this: the border between the city of Lansing and Lansing Township runs down the center of the street. I have observed that Lansing typically installs a sidewalk on any block that has residences. Lansing Township is largely uninterested in sidewalks.
Mifflin Avenue doesn’t serve as the shining example of Lansing sidewalk superiority that this would suggest. The sidewalk on Mifflin is awful, some of the worst I’ve found on the east side. Many slabs have subsided far enough to be partially or fully covered in a layer of mud and weeds. Many are crumbled. Walking from Kalamazoo to Michigan, I noticed that all the stamps were Cantu 1987 marks like this one. Notably, that suggests little or no sidewalk work has happened on this block since 1987. It shows.
