Posted on by bunnyhugger

S. Howard St., new sidewalk but doomed houses

Four houses in a row have been condemned on the west side of South Howard Street between Michigan and Prospect, and I took my camera out there to document them before their eventual demolition. I found a pristine new section of sidewalk in front of them, still marked off with orange cones. Properly speaking this should be a Hall of Shame entry since the sidewalk is unstamped, despite Lansing Township code requiring it, but given Lansing Township’s shoddy record with sidewalks I think I have to consider any sidewalk installlation to be a win.

A sign in front of the houses talks about a hearing to change the zoning for a planned development, and the scuttlebutt is that it is going to be condos. Oddly, the sign gives the current zoning as commercial. The recent sales record sheds some light on this, as until recently they were owned by the Indian Trails bus company. Indian Trails also owns the parking lot at the corner of Michigan and Howard. It was previously a used car lot, and since Indian Trails took it over, it has gotten weedy and overgrown, since all they have used it for is to occasionally park a few of their Michigan Flyer airport buses. In the 2010s sometime all the houses in the 100 block of South Howard were demolished, leaving a vacant lot between the Indian Trails lot and the four doomed houses. I don’t know the full story, but can only speculate that Indian Trails had some plan for these blocks that never went anywhere.

When these 1920s houses are demolished, it will leave only five houses and a couple of businesses remaining on South Howard. The real estate listing cards in the Belon Real Estate Collection from CADL’s digital local history collection reveal that from the early 1960s to early 1970s, nearly every time a house was listed on South Howard it was marked “value in land only,” meaning the houses were worthless and probably best demolished. This was underlined by the way they generally did not bother filling in the year built for the houses, but marked them simply as “OLD.” Yet they kept surviving anyway, until recently.

Posted on by bunnyhugger

S. Fairview Ave., O & M, 2015

It’s somewhat unusual to find a dated O & M (city Operations and Maintenance) stamp in any case, but especially rare in the southern reaches of the Urbandale neigborhood. This one is near the dead end (south of Horton, north of I-496) on the west side of the street.

Sorry for the poor photo. I’m still not used to my new phone. It’s delightfully tiny but a bit hard to handle for photographs.
Posted on by bunnyhugger

Marcus St., Eastlund Concrete, 2022

I know you’re thinking that I’m a little early for a change, but actually, I’m a lot late. Sorry about that. It’s finals week, also known as crunch time for professors. Anyway, here’s a couple of stamps from the entrance to an alleyway that runs from Marcus to Elizabeth Street, between Clemens and Fairview.

This one is from the approach to the alleyway. I had to scrape dirt away from it with my foot.
The entrance to the alleyway and the sidewalk that it crosses were evidently done at the same time.
This stamp is from the sidewalk part. The dirt is currently doing a very nice job of making the letters pop.
Posted on by bunnyhugger

S. Francis Ave., White Hawk, 2022

I walked on the southern blocks of South Francis Avenue for the first time in a while and discovered, to my surprise, that a fair bit of sidewalk work had been done recently, all of it by White Hawk (who also did a lot of work on South Magnolia recently). Here is a representative example, which happens to be in front of a house I like, on the west side of the street. It would be at the northwest corner of Francis and Harton if Harton hadn’t been vacated at this point.

I like a couple of things about this property. One is the pleasant yard. It doesn’t look like much in the gray late winter, but it has nice shrubs and flowers, lawn ornaments, and a tidy split-rail fence. The other is the house itself, built (surprisingly) in 1942. It’s a small, boxy house, like many on the street, but it has been given just enough little details to lift it above its peers. It has shutters and trim details, and my favorite part, Tudor-like timbers on the sides of the attic level that give it a storybook flair. Its current paint job even has them in a contrasting color. It’s neat.

I wish the timber details were easier to see in the photo, but they’re obscured by the shrub.
Posted on by bunnyhugger

S. Marcus St., unsigned, 1949

Here is a faded date with no name, or possibly one that had a name that is no longer visible. It’s at the southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street, on Marcus. I’m interested in it because I have found relatively few 1949 stamps, and because the typeface makes me think of a DPW stamp. I’m trying to narrow down when the DPW because the DPS and right now the earliest DPS stamp I’ve found has been 1950, but there is a possible 1947 one that is difficult to read.

Posted on by bunnyhugger

Marcus St., Eastlund Concrete, 2022

Here’s a new(ish) Eastlund Concrete stamp from the house on the corner of southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street. The house faces Magnolia, but this particular stamp is on Marcus. It looks like in addition to some sidewalk, Eastlund also redid part of the diagonal front walk. I like the way it heads for the corner instead of aiming straight forward to Magnolia. I’ve admired this house for a while because of the interesting multiple cladding on the front facade.

Checking the Belon Real Estate Collection at the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection, I find that the house was built in 1946. A photo of it in 1958 shows it in what I assume was its original paint scheme, with the second floor painted a much darker shade than the first, which adds even more interest to its face; it’s a shame more recent owners have painted it all the same color. Still, it is an attractive house marred by deferred maintenance, unsurprising since it is landlord-owned.

Posted on by bunnyhugger

Mifflin Ave., Saddest Sidewalk in Lansing?

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.

Looking south toward the southern terminus of Mifflin Avenue’s sidewalk. The last house on this side of the block is visible, and beyond it, the Harton Street Pump Station.

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.

Looking north.

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?

Look toward the center of the sidewalk, just past the end of it. Hint: it has three leaves.

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.

Posted on by bunnyhugger

S. Francis Ave., Cantu & Sons, 1987

This is from the very last, sad-looking piece of sidewalk on the west side of the south end of South Francis Avenue, in the beleaguered Urbandale neighborhood. The sidewalk peters out at the southern end of the southernmost house’s lot. Unlike on the other side of the street which has had its sidewalk removed, it appears that the sidewalk may always have ended here, based on there being no trace of it in the 2007 Google Street View. The stamp looks off-center, but only because the sidewalk is sinking into the earth on the left.

Oddly, the vacant land south of here (at least part of which is occupied by an urban farm) is owned by the City of Lansing Parks and Recreation Department. A lot of parcels on the southernmost blocks of Urbandale are owned by the city or the county, but the puzzling part is what the Parks Department’s involvement is in this. I haven’t seen that in other city-owned lots. The boundary sketch of it in the city records show a fairly large piece of land that stretches way out to the west behind Foster Avenue, where it forms an L-shape around something labeled “DNR Polluted Site.” I’d like to know more about that, too.

Posted on by bunnyhugger

S. Hayford Ave., Telegraph/Fire Alarm cover revisited

I was walking past this telegraph/fire alarm utility cover on the northeast corner of South Hayford Avenue and Elizabeth Street, and I decided to try kicking dirt off it in order to read the rest of the manufacturer’s name.

It’s hard to see in the photo, but I was able to determine that the outer edge reads “Capital Casting Co., Lansing Michigan.” According to OpenCorporates, the Capital Casting Company was incorporated in 1905 and dissolved in 1986. Its registered address is given as 6869 West Grand River Avenue, which (if the numbering is the same) would be in the vicinity of the Capital Area Humane Society today. An article from the May 8, 1938, State Journal titled “Lansing has 65 little industries-from guns to automobile,” which Timothy Bowman has republished in his highly recommended local history blog, instead gives its address as 500 South Hosmer Street. Today that address belongs to Lansing Flooring Supplies, but the building is newer. A similar article on local industries from the February 4, 1973, State Journal does not mention Capital Casting.