Someone with a subscription to Newspapers.com (which I don’t have) has helpfully clipped a legal notice compelling sidewalk construction from the May 15, 1961, [Lansing] State Journal. The city was having sidewalk built on a lot of streets near Cavanaugh Park in the old Everett neighborhood. I see a lot of parcels on Lowcroft Street, Ora Street, and Southgate Avenue, among others. Also, note the dubious factoid about weasels run as a space-filler above the legal notices.
As I’m not familiar with the south side at all, I was surprised to see a Livernois Street listed. Livernois is a major street in Detroit, but I didn’t know there was one in Lansing. I went to check it out in the Google street view and discovered that it is such an inconsequential street that Google has not taken photos of it. It’s a narrow, dirt road, a block long, that runs alongside Cavanaugh Park; according to Lansing’s property records, there are no addresses on it. Curiously, there are two lots on Livernois listed in the 1961 sidewalk construction notice, yet the street view (its short length can be seen from Cavanaugh) shows that there is no sidewalk on it now.
This stamp is on the ramp that connects North Aurelius Road to East Malcolm X Street, on the west side of Aurelius. This is the only way to get from Aurelius to Malcolm X now that they have removed the ramp that used to serve the northbound traffic.
There are a lot of L & L 2002 stamps in the vicinity of the Aurelius overpasses, probably all the result of the project that reduced Aurelius from four lanes to two.
The street sign makes the claim that this is the 1900 block of Malcolm X Street, which really stretches the definition of a “block.” It’s more of a service road between the two streets than a proper part of Malcolm X. Then again, very little of Malcolm X Street can be called “proper” given how disjointed it is.
I would say this might be the most forlorn stretch of sidewalk in Lansing, except I’m not sure I should dignify this narrow strip of asphalt by calling it a sidewalk. It’s along the former ramp that serviced East Malcolm X Street from northbound Aurelius Road. It must have been laid along the ramp with the intent of serving as a sidewalk, yet I don’t know why. Until I walked on it to take these pictures, I had never walked down there myself and was surprised to discover it even had a sidewalk. It makes a sharp turn under the overpass and eventually comes out in the Potter-Walsh neighborhood. There are at least two better and shorter ways for a pedestrian to get to Potter-Walsh from here, and walking so close to the ramp when there was any traffic on it must have been unpleasant to say the least.
Looking north along the ramp. The raised area on the left is Aurelius Road.
I walked it, though, and since I’m a rules-abiding person (probably to a fault) I got a little thrill from this laughably minor transgression. This ramp has been amputated from Aurelius Rd. and, despite still having street lamps beaming down on it at night, it now has no purpose. When they rebuilt the railway overpass recently, they also quietly decommissioned the ramp. The southern end of it, where the ramp splits off from Aurelius, has been removed. The rest has been left alone, with a surprisingly neat curb capping its new end.
And looking back south, from whence I came. The curb they put in to (needlessly?) cap off the start of the road is visible in the distance.
When I moved to town and for a while after, there was a sign on northbound Aurelius directing downtown traffic to use what was then the Main Street ramp. I was mystified by this when I first saw it. What crazy person would use that spooky alley to get downtown when you could just go up to Michigan and turn left? And why the heck is that nothing road called “Main Street”?
What I was looking at was the remnant of some previous attempt to stop traffic on Aurelius, which was then a four-lane road, from blazing right into a residential neighborhood at highway speeds as Aurelius became Clemens Avenue. This had been a sore point for Clemens residents for a long time by then. The ramp was an attempt to funnel downtown-bound traffic away from Clemens. As far as I can tell, no one was fooled. I’m not sure when the sign went away but it might have been when they tried the next (and possibly more successful) traffic calming measure: around 2002, they reduced Aurelius to two lanes and lowered the speed limit.
I guess they must have decided that the ramp was a failed experiment and took the bridge reconstruction as an opportunity to remove it. Northbound traffic headed for Malcolm X can still get there by the more direct route, taking a left turn a little way further north.
This manhole cover is in the sidewalk (if you can call that asphalt mess a sidewalk) that accompanies North Aurelius Road as it climbs over the railroad tracks. It’s on the west side of the street, roughly between Walsh and Perkins.
All over Michigan, when you see a manhole cover or a sewer grate, the odds are good that it will display the name of the East Jordan Iron Works. They were founded in 1883 as the Round and Malpass Foundry and made cast iron parts for the lumber industry, ships, machinery, agricultural equipment, and railroads. East Jordan is in the northwest of Michigan, so the connection with the lumber industry is unsurprising. In 1885 their name changed to the East Jordan Iron Works. Since 2012, they call themselves just plain “EJ,” which I find a little disappointing. Their corporate headquarters are still in East Jordan, but they are now a multinational company, having acquired a lot of other foundries over the years. In 2017 they built a new foundry after almost 135 years in their original location, which is amazing. Happily for the town, I’m sure, they built the new one just 14 miles away from the original.
EJ has a detailed company history and timeline on its Web site. I wish all companies did this.
The Potter-Walsh neighborhood can be seen to the west of the Aurelius overpass.
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.
This one is on the west side of Parker Street just south of the corner of East Malcolm X (or is it Main Street?). It’s right around the corner from the famous Schneeberger & Koort stamp, as seen in my photo below.
This is the sidewalk block at the southeast corner of Parker Street and East Malcolm X Street. I’ll call it Parker since the house at this property faces Parker.
It’s of interest for two reasons. First, I have seen two stamps on one block before, but never three (driveways excepted). I think they were trying to make it clear which park of the sidewalk they were marking out, fearing the intersection would make it ambiguous whether they had paved Parker or Main (as it was then called). And speaking of Main, here is the other reason this spot is interesting. Look at the street sign that is at this corner.
Main St. was renamed Malcolm X St. years ago… except, apparently, the 1200 block.
Did they forget to change the sign when Main changed its name to Malcolm X in 2010? Or did this little stub end of the street somehow escape the official name change? I’ve been to this spot before when cataloguing the famous Schneeberger & Koort stamp, the one that brought the wonder of the Bum Walks Controversy into my life, but I did not notice the sign at the time.
This stamp is on what I call the “other” Regent Street, the blocks south of I-496. It’s on the east side of the street between Walsh and East Malcolm X.
It’s very faint, but you can just make out the “P.”
It appears undated. The only other P. Beasley stamp I’ve found is dated 1960, so it might be from around that time period.
Looking north on Regent, with the intersection of Malcolm X in view. The stamp is on the nearest full slab.
I walked a 5K today (the Mayor’s River Walk) and so I didn’t take my usual neighborhood walk. Realizing I didn’t have a stamp for the blog, I suddenly decided to pull into the next neighborhood street I came to as I drove home from Potter Park on Pennsylvania. The next one turned out to be Walsh Street, so this stamp is from the north side of Walsh between Pennsylvania and Parker. I’m not sure if the date on this one is 1966 or 1968 but I mildly favor 1968.
It’s a contractor I haven’t seen before. I took my usual approach for finding contractors when it’s in the “Initial(s) and Last Name” format that often comes up in older stamps: I checked Find a Grave for people buried in a cemetery in or near Lansing with a matching name and a plausible birth and death date. In this case I found Alton M. Brayton (1908-1986) buried in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens in DeWitt.
Facing west on Walsh Street. This is the better side of the street, as far as sidewalks; the walks on the other side are so crumbled as to be totally absent in some places. The city should be ashamed to have let the sidewalks get so bad. That’s some Lansing Township level BS.
Armed with a full name, I searched again and found the June 13, 1974, Clinton County News (bless Clinton County for having scans of many old issues online). On page 11A, a brief piece titled “Sign Ovid Street Contract” accompanies a photograph:
It was contract signing time in Ovid Monday as village officials, engineers and contractors inked the line for $230,000 street building project. Signing the contracts are [from left] Earl Canfield, village clerk; Carl McIntosh of Capitol Consultants; Alton Brayton, contractor and Dale Crossland, village clerk.
Clinton County News, June 13, 1974, p. 11A
The photo is very muddy because the paper has been scanned in black-and-white, but you can get at least a little bit of an idea what Brayton looked like.
My husband found this stamp first, and showed me a photo of it. It’s on the south side of East Malcolm X Street just west of Parker Street, on a little spur of Malcolm X. Much of Malcolm X (née Main Street) has become various I-496 service roads, and in places splits away from itself (while somehow still technically being “the same road”). It’s really a mess, in map terms. This stub is at the end of a block-plus of what must be the original neighborhood street. West of this point one can continue on the sidewalk, but it is a dead end for vehicles. I haven’t walked these blocks before, despite them being within my usual walking-from-home radius, mainly because the area around 496 gets very pedestrian-unfriendly (deserving of its own Hall of Shame entry).
I was really excited when my showed me the photo of this stamp because of the name Schneeberger. I had previously found several E. Schneeberger stamps from the 1920s, but had been unable to read the name on them until finally having an epiphany while walking past one in favorable light. My husband jokingly referred to the second name as “Oort,” knowing there was a preceding letter but finding it illegible. I decided it looked like a very faint K and did a search for “Schneeberger & Koort.” That got one exactly one hit, but oh what a hit. It’s easily the greatest article about Lansing sidewalks I have seen. It deserves, and shall have, its own entry.
Facing the western semi-dead-end of Malcolm X Street. Past the barricade is… also Malcolm X Street.
Unfortunately, beyond the above State Journal article from 1914 which references them, I was unable to find anything about Schneeberger & Koort. I assume it’s the same Schneeberger who went into business on his own later, or a relative. It’s also unfortunate that this stamp is undated, but I would guess it pre-dates the Schneeberger solo stamps and might be from around the time of the State Journal article.
