This is one of the “second style” of Department of Public Works stamps. It’s on the west side of Horton Street, just south of the intersection of Jerome. I recognized it mainly by the size and style, since it is so worn. The date is even worse. It’s just barely possible to make it out as 1935; it probably won’t be for too many more years.
I’m usually drawn to the clearest, sharpest stamps, but there is some value in capturing these very faded ones too.
A friend recently cursed me by introducing me to HistoricAerials.com. I say “cursed” because for the last few days I have spent hours examining the changes in local streets instead of, say, going to bed at a reasonable hour. I have spent a lot of this time looking at how the freeway and time have changed the Urbandale neighborhood. So that is why I set out to walk through it in real life tonight, without considering that the snow of last night and today would probably not be very cleared there. All this preamble is mainly just to apologize for tonight’s entry, gleaned from one of the only cleared sidewalks I traversed.
This is on the east side of South Fairview Avenue, just south of the corner of Harton. (Harton is a source of fascination for me and I have spent some time on HistoricAerials trying to figure out when and why it lost its three middle blocks. Sadly there is no sidewalk on any part of Harton, so I will not be able to feature it here.) I can’t read the date but it is obviously one of the numerous 1987-88 stamps found all over the east side. The house it’s in front of is the only one on the east side of the 700 block. The southernmost blocks of the Urbandale streets have lost many houses to demolition and look very sparse and forlorn.
Looking north on South Fairview, toward the intersection of Harton.
These stamps are on Rumsey Avenue just north of Michigan, alongside the Church of the Resurrection complex. There are one or two more E.R. Premoe stamps along that stretch besides these, but my hands were getting cold.
This is a plainer stamp than the other E.R. Premoe version, though the tradeoff is that it is easier to read. The date shows that the business continued on for a good while after the death of Earl R. “Lefty” Premoe.
Nothing new or exciting this time, but with fresh snow all over I didn’t have very many options. I walked into Hunter Park, around the paved loop, and back out via Elizabeth Street, stopping to take a picture of this (as usual) undated O & M stamp on one of the last few sidewalk blocks before the dead end. This is on the south side of Elizabeth. I like the deep imprint that makes the borders of the stamper visible.
Elizabeth’s western dead end touches Hunter Park. The sidewalk on both sides just ends without any official trail leading into the park. There is a very well-worn social trail leading from the southern sidewalk toward the pool area. There’s something just a little odd to me about the way the sidewalk goes past the last house’s front porch steps only to end abruptly at the edge of the property when it’s not done being useful yet.
I encountered this stamp walking west on the south side of Vine Street between Custer and Ferguson. It was an unfamiliar one to me, so I stopped to check it out. I could make out that the second word of the name was Rite, but couldn’t figure the first word out. (It’s actually possible in the photo, I think, so maybe you can.)
Luckily, stamps usually come in pairs, presumably on either end of a run of new sidewalk, so often the second one fills in the obscurities in the first. This was one of those cases. I walked a short distance further and found this one.
Either the date or the name is upside down, and I’m going to say the name, based on the placement within the slab and the orientation relative to the eastern stamp. (Paired stamps usually face opposite to each other.)
I was quite surprised to discover that Bilt-Rite is still in business, on East Street in Lansing. According to their About Us page (and I do love a business Web site with an About page) they were founded in 1952 by Hugh Zweering and are currently run by his son and grandson. They seem to specialize in home construction and renovation now, which might be why I haven’t seen any more recent sidewalk stamps from them.
1Maybe I should have gone with “Democracy Dies in Plastic.”
Earlier today I told my husband that I was starting to doubt I would ever find a new “oldest” stamp. At least, I said, not as long as I keep walking in the same neighborhoods on the east side. I was beginning to think all the really interesting stamps had been mined out. That was 3 pm, this was 6:30 pm.
This is on the west side of Custer Avenue between Michigan and Jerome, and may be the oldest dated stamp I’ve found. The fact that the earliest stamps usually include a month makes it possible for me to say that this is older than a previous record-holder, the October 1907 J.P. Sleight stamp on Jerome Street. I can’t know whether it is older or younger than the 1907 V.D. Minnis stamp on Regent Street because the date on that one is lost to time.
Still, while I’d have loved to see an undisputed new champion, this was my most exciting find in weeks, and it’s been right under my nose, on a street I frequently walk on. Apparently I have been in the habit of walking on the other side. I actually thought it was a V.D. Minnis stamp when I was coming toward it, since the style is quite similar.
At first I wasn’t able to find much about W.H. McKrill besides that he provided a testimonial for the Aladdin Company, a Bay City manufacturer of kit homes, in an advertisement in the March 1921 issue of Illustrated World magazine. Then I made a guess that W.H. might be a William, and that got me a very useful hit. The February 24, 1955, Lansing State Journal included a human interest piece: “Oldsters Vie for Honor: ‘Bill’ McKrill Beats Lewis J. Bugbee: Has Lived in Lansing 344 Days Longer.” Evidently, William McKrill turned up in the LSJ offices to complain because they had profiled Lewis J. Bugbee with the claim that he was “believed to be Lansing’s oldest son” when McKrill was older.
According to the article, William McKrill worked in the Bement factory until it closed about 1907, and then “later… entered the construction business and helped to build the first pavement on Michigan Avenue. For this he was paid $1.35 for a 10-hour day.” This initially made me think that he must be the very same W.H. McKrill, but then I became less certain. Would he really have gone straight from working at Bement to running his own paving business (and getting such an important job as paving Michigan Avenue) the same year? I wondered if William was instead a relative of W.H. and worked in the latter’s business. William’s father’s name did not begin with W, but it could have been some other relative. But I have found some evidence that W.H.’s wife was named Ida, which would indeed make W.H. the same person as the “Bill” in the above article. I know because of their grave in Mount Hope Cemetery. (William died the same year the article was published.)
One last tidbit about William, and I do know this is the same William based on the reference to his address (which I saw listed as the address of Ida in her obituary). According to the January 17, 1931, Lansing State Journal, he was arrested after having been found intoxicated while serving as a school traffic guard at the intersection of Bingham and Michigan. He must have been in a visibly bad state because the police were called by a nearby service station attendant who advised them that the crossing guard was in “no condition to take care of school traffic.” No doubt that crossing guard post served students going to Bingham Street School (the original one, not the 1950s replacement that used to be my polling place before being demolished in 2013).
This is another cryptic one. It reminds me of those “BAY03” ones that pop up here and there. The style is similar enough that I wonder if there is a connection. It’s on the east side of Clifford Street between Prospect and Eureka. Is the “80” a date or part of the contractor’s name? I don’t know how to begin figuring it out. It will likely remain a mystery.
I know, I know, it’s a plain old Cantu & Sons 1987. They’re everywhere. I can’t help it; there was a dusting of snow over almost everything and I got desperate and took something I could actually see, if barely. There is a pair of them in front of StateSide Wellness, on the south side of East Kalamazoo Street between Regent and Clemens. They are very worn, almost certainly due to being next to the building’s driveway.
I’m still not quite used to the place being a marijuana dispensary, as it recently remade itself. When I moved to town, it had been Lucky’s Market, a convenience store. I thought it was nice having a shop close by my house in case I ran out of pop, though it was pretty disorderly inside, had an off-kilter selection, and took only cash. I gathered that it had a bit of a reputation on the east side. Someone in my pinball league once said to me, “You know, they used to sell little balls of steel wool there for a dime each.” My husband likes to say that it became much more reputable as a pot shop than it was as a convenience store. I will admit that it looks neater and does a better job shoveling its sidewalk.
Another longtime resident told me that she remembered when it had been a fried chicken place. She said people used to like to get their fried chicken there and then eat it while doing laundry next door. (The place next door is now a convenience store – for a long time there were two of them side by side taking up that side of the block – but had been a coin laundry before I moved to town.) I looked into it, and it appears it was one of several Lansing locations of Famous Recipe Chicken (sometimes called Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken). It seems to have been that from around 1966 to 1991, so during the era of these stamps. After that, it seems to have been something called Steak 2 U for a while before becoming Lucky’s in 1994.
The building was built in 1956. While Lucky’s was shedding its old cladding and plastic roof trim (during the transformation to StateSide Wellness) we got a chance to see the building naked. It was a surprisingly tiny pillbox of a building made of concrete block. This revealed bricked-over remnants of garage bay doors, suggesting an early existence as a service station.
Here we are on the west side of Clifford Street between Kalamazoo and Marcus. It’s a good thing I found one clear enough to take a photo; most of the neighborhood sidewalks were obscured by a light layer of snow. This one just has a really nice, aesthetic frosting. It’s a variation of Moore Trosper I haven’t photographed yet, but it was really the pretty way the snow filled the impressions that caught my eye, truth be told.
This is the third Moore Trosper variation I have catalogued. It lacks the stylish flair of this version but is very similar to this one, differing only in the absence of the hyphen.
This one might not, scratch that, probably will not excite anyone as much as it did me. But I’ll try to explain. This DPW (Department of Public Works) stamp is on the east side of Bingham Street between Eureka and Prospect. It’s a little worn, but that is definitely 1927.
Why does that matter? It’s not even close to the earliest DPW stamp I’ve found, so that’s not it. No, it matters because I previously had not seen this style of stamp used with a date this early. Stamps I had collected from 1918 through the early 1940s had used a different style. I already knew there was some overlap, in that the earliest style (call it “Style A”, with a larger typeface reading “DEPARTMENT OF / PUBLIC WORKS”) can be found on stamps as late as 1942, and the style I think of as the 1940s-50s style (call it “Style B.,” with a smaller typeface reading “LANSING D.P.W.”) had previously turned up on stamps as early as 1936. This stamp pushes the earliest date for Style B backward almost another decade. As Popeye would say: “I kin not savvy.”
The many species and subspecies of DPW stamps deserve a full taxonomy. Unfortunately I don’t have the time for that just now, but I am planning on doing it soon.