I decided to take a walk through the Urbandale neighborhood on this lovely, warm, fall evening. Urbandale was long ago the site of a race track, which was sold to developers in the (nineteen-)teens and made into a neighborhood despite the fact that it is in the 100-year floodplain and has been subjected to damaging floods and evacuations. People have trouble getting insurance because of this and so a lot of houses were abandoned and became derelict. So many houses were torn down over the years that a good chunk of the neighborhood is now community gardens and small farms. The Land Bank is big on those. Anyway, here’s the sidewalk stamp of the day, located on the west side of South Magnolia Avenue between Marcus and the dead end (500 block).

I know, I know. “Another DPW stamp? Yawn.” But I am still trying to narrow down when they switched stamp styles. This one complicates things. It uses the style of the 1940s and later stamps, but I have a stamp logged from 1939 that uses the older-style “Department of Public Works” stamp. That one is quite worn and perhaps I misread the date, but I am pretty sure I have seen other 1930s stamps in this style. I will have to look for a clearer one to confirm.

Kind of a boring discovery, I know, but I’m intrigued by the mystery of the (possibly) overlapping dates for the two styles of stamps.