There is a house I admire – a big old house, built in 1890 – at the northwest corner of Jerome and Marshall Streets. It faces Jerome, and on the Marshall side there are some now-useless steps that the residents have decorated with a couple of nice planter boxes.
Presumably the steps were intended to allow residents to go from the side entrance of the house down to Marshall Street. While the flowers are nice, it strikes me as a shame to block access to the sidewalk from this side. I wonder when the fence was put in and who was the last person to walk up or down the steps.
This 2007 Eastlund stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Hosmer and 8th. There are many like it between Sparrow and the traffic circle at Washington Square. There was a big construction project that tore everything up in 2006, and Eastlund must have gotten the contract to put the sidewalk back. I chose this one to photograph mainly as an excuse to show you what it’s in front of: a set of ghost stairs.
These stairs are between the Classic Barber Shop (which is attached to Stober’s Bar) and Moriarty’s Pub. They lead to nothing more than a small green space. I suppose one could say that they serve as a street access for the side doors of the two adjacent buildings, but they’re really a relic of a house that once stood here.
I know about this house from perusing the Caterino Real Estate Image Collection, a wonderful resource that the Capital Area District Library has digitized. From 1963 to 1989, a local history enthusiast named David Caterino drove around taking photos of old buildings around Lansing, probably ones that he had reason to think would be demolished soon. On January 31, 1986 – thirteen and a half years before my arrival in Lansing – he took photos of a house at 808 East Michigan. The stairs can be seen in one photo, looking just as they look now. I wish Caterino had taken a wider view of the house from the street, but from what can be seen, it was a large and grand house, with unusually steep gables. An access stairway to the second story had been added in the rear, suggesting it spent its later years subdivided into apartments. In the rear view photo it is also evident how close it was building next door, currently Moriarty’s Pub.
I thought that was as much as I would be able to tell you about the house, but then I realized I could also check the Belon Real Estate Collection, a set of index cards that CADL has also digitized. The cards represent quick information for real estate agents about properties listed from the 1950s through early 1970s. There are a few listings for 808 East Michigan, listed together with 810, which then as today was a barber shop. There is a photo with them, which is very grainy from being copied but does give a better sense of how it looked from the street. The owner of both apparently lived in the apartment above the barber shop. If I’m reading things right, it failed to sell in 1961 at a listing price of $55,000, then in 1964 the same owner tried and failed again at $47,500, and then once again in 1971 at $62,000. Unfortunately, the year built is given in one card as 1946 (this can’t mean the house and must be the barber shop) and in another as N/A. I would guess it was a late 19th century house. According to the 1961 card, it was divided into five apartments: one two-bedroom and two one-bedrooms downstairs, and one two-bedroom and one one-bedroom upstairs.
No sidewalk for you today; in fact there is no sidewalk at all on this block, Mifflin Avenue between Kalamazoo and Marcus. Instead, here is a little relic that always makes me a bit sad: the stairs to a long-gone house. (I’m not sure how long gone, but it was already gone by the earliest Google street views in 2007.)
There is only one house remaining on this (west) side of the block, and that one is so obscured by tree cover that it is hard to see. There are a few more houses on the other side, but like much of the Urbandale neighborhood, this is a sparsely-occupied block, and one that is likely to continue depopulating.
