Lately you haven’t been able to keep me away from Urbandale, not that anyone has tried. This stamp is on the south side of Marcus Street just west of South Hayford Avenue. It’s the earliest use I’ve seen of the second style of Department of Public Works stamps, the one I used to call the “1940s style” until I discovered one from 1927. There was a long overlap in use between the first and second style of DPW stamps. I have stamps between 1917 and 1942 for the first style, and the second style I can now push back to 1926, so they had a good fifteen plus years of overlapping use.

At one point this sidewalk bordered a 1937 house at 504 South Hayford Avenue, which fell into the city’s hands due to a tax foreclosure in 2011 and was presumably demolished around then. CADL’s local history collection has an old assessor photo of the house, which was tiny. I am fascinated by this mysterious house. According to 1950s real estate cards digitized by CADL, it had a one-car garage and a double lot, yet it contained only two rooms: a 10 x 12 living room and an 8 x 10 kitchen. Zero bedrooms, it states specifically. All right, so there was really just one all-purpose room plus a kitchen. But, but, but… where was the bathroom? The real estate card leaves blank the area where it would usually say how many bathrooms there were and with what fixtures. Surely this house must have had a bathroom, but if the real estate agents refused to regard it as its own room, what am I to picture? And why did someone build a garage for a house this tiny instead of using the materials to make more house? Why stick the smallest house in Lansing onto a double lot? So many unanswered questions, and I can’t use the city’s property records online to check into any of this because the records get wiped out when a house is demolished.

What’s here now is, of course, a community garden, specifically a raspberry patch. The same fence that once guarded the tiny house (as can be seen in the 2007 Google Street View) serves the raspberries now.