Bad postcard of the week: Goodbye Grand Rapids and hello Lansing, where it's safe to cross the street

There’s one thing I've noticed while working in Lansing: The streets are pretty much deserted.

It’s the strangest thing. You can cross just about any street at any time. You can pause in the middle and admire – and photograph – the manhole covers. We know there are tens of thousands of people there. But they must park in the morning and walk everywhere else.

So I’m going to be charitable with this week’s bad postcard, our first under this new format.

I’m going to assume that the photographer was not trying to capture the stadium where the Lansing Lugnuts play.

Because if you are going to slap the large “Lansing” tag on the front of your postcard, you are going to show the Capitol, or the Boji Tower and a view of Washington Street – places that might be some of the buildings that people think of when they think “Lansing.”

I’m sure that when someone says “Lansing,” Cooley Law School Stadium is not the thing that comes to mind, unless you are talking to someone on the West Michigan Whitecaps, and even the players might think “We pass a lot of interesting buildings before we get to the stadium.”

And, of course, of you are going to make the stadium the focus of your postcard, you are going to get somewhat closer to it, so people can see some of the interesting details, or even recognize it as a baseball stadium at all.

Instead, we get a stadium off in the distance and lots and lots of asphalt. So I’m going to assume that the focus of this card IS the asphalt, and our creative photographer, like me, was struck that you could take a photo of a busy main drag and not see a single car, truck, bicycle or pedestrian.

As many of you know, this week I started working in Lansing, with in an office in the Romney Building, which would make a nice postcard, too.

Colleague Shandra Martinez gets credit for preparing this awesome cake.

My wonderful MLive colleagues created an amazing farewell cake featuring a bad postcard of the place where I’d be commuting to each day.

And so, I present to you, the first ever bad postcard cake! Thank you to my friends and co-workers for a spectacular and emotional send-off. 

You can find previous bad postcard stories here.