I picked up this one on a driveway apron on the west side of North Fairview Avenue between Vine and Fernwood. I can’t resist a 1920s stamp, even if they are much more common than I originally thought when I started the blog.
Unfortunately, while I can read the date fine, the name is deep but obscure. It looks to end with -ER, possibly -MMER or -NNER, but I can’t figure anything else out. Normally a driveway apron stamp of this age would likely be Lansing DPW, but what I can make out of this one does not match that. I tried using a flashlight to cast a raking light across it, which sometimes helps, but it didn’t do any good this time. Maybe next time I see it in daylight I’ll be luckier.
Looking south on Fairview. The stamp is on the driveway apron, bottom of the photo just right of center.
This Department of Public Works stamp is on the north side of Hickory Street between Jones and Holmes. I’ll always collect a diagonal DPW stamp; they seem almost always to be from 1921. This one has a further quirk in that the year has been stamped upside-down at a rather haphazard angle.
This rugged and worn stamp from the north side of Larned Street between Jones and Holmes seems hopelessly illegible at first blush. A comparison with other stamps, however, reveals that it is probably a William Meister stamp from 1921.
Looking west on Larned Street. This stamp is close to the corner of South Holmes.
This “second style” Department of Public Works stamp is on North Francis Avenue just south of the southeast corner of Francis and Fernwood. The stamp is unusually far off center, and is getting cozy with a large evergreen tree.
I had to lean right into the adjacent evergreen to take this photo.
The house by this sidewalk faces the 2500 block of Vine Street and was built in 1986. Few of the houses on the east side are that new, so I was curious if another house had preceded it here. I tried looking for a real estate card in the Belon Real Estate Collection at CADL. There are plenty of cards up through 1530 Vine, then there are only two more, one in the 2200 block and one in the 2400 block. This leads me to theorize that this part of Vine was still largely undeveloped in the 1960s (when the cards date from). Still, there must have been a sidewalk here at least back to 1925.
Here is a beautifully preserved Department of Public Works stamp on Vine Street, just east of the northeast corner of Vine and Ferguson. I’m surprised that I hadn’t captured this one before and I had to double check to make sure.
Looking east on Vine; the stamp is on the first block past the corner. (It faces a BBRPCI stamp.)
This is one of my favorite curiosities to catalogue, a diagonal stamp. All of the diagonal Department of Public Works stamps I’ve found date from 1921 except one (which has a 1924 date). Some specific foreman must have favored diagonal stamps around that time, or at least that’s my theory.
This stamp is near the northwest corner of South Holmes Street and Hickory Street, just barely on Hickory.
The date is hard to see if you don’t know where to look. It’s underneath and at an angle to the name stamp, facing vertically in this photo. This is taken from just east of the stamp, facing west.This one is taken from the south edge of the slab, facing north, in order to orient the date right side up.Standing at the corner of Hickory (on the left) and Holmes (on the right). The stamp is on the extra-wide block in the center of the photo.
This stamp from William Meister is on the northwest corner of North Hayford Avenue and Fernwood Street, facing Fernwood. (Google Maps thinks Fernwood is an Avenue but all the street signs I’ve seen have it as Street. I’ve found quite a few of these Street/Avenue discrepancies.) There’s another one a bit further west on Fernwood, the same year.
My previous entry on William Meister referenced an old Lansing State Journal article I had found which reported that Meister and Fred Johnson would be constructing a new cobblestone entrance to Moores Park from Woodlawn Avenue, one which promised to be “one of the most attractive and artistic of any in any of the municipal walks.” I remarked in that entry, “I am not very familiar with Moores Park, so I don’t know what the walk in question looks like today.” Now seems like a good time to mention that I later checked the Google Street View of the Woodlawn entrance to Moores Park and could plainly see the sloping cobblestone-lined path. It is indeed attractive. It would lead one right to the Moores Memorial Natatorium, a historic and impressive-looking raised pool currently threatened with demolition.
Looking east on Fernwood. This sidewalk is pretty cracked up, but still in better shape than the last Meister stamp I featured.
I know a 1920s Department of Public Works stamp is pretty old hat for the blog by now. This one is pretty badly preserved, too, recognizable more by shape than anything else. But it’s interesting for its location. It’s on Marcus Street at the southeast corner of Hayford and Marcus, which puts it directly across the street from another DPW stamp from 1926. What’s notable is that despite being from the same year and in close proximity, they are two different styles of stamp, this one being the earliest known version (apparently used from the 1910s to early 1940s) and the other one being the second style (apparently used from the mid-1920s through the 1940s).
Looking east on Marcus Street. The house here faces Hayford.
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.
Looking southwest into the former yard of 504 from Marcus. The stamp is visible.
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.
Looking into the raspberry patch from the Hayford (front) side.
When I first started this blog, I thought it was a big deal to find a 1920s stamp. That didn’t last long. I quickly discovered stamps in the teens and not too long later, a few in the aughts. But I can’t quite get past my initial belief that every 1920s stamp had to be photographed as rare, so even now that I’ve learned how plentiful they are, I will always stop for a 20s.
This faded Department of Public Works stamp is on Marcus Street, on the southeast corner of Marcus and South Clemens Avenue. DPW stamps are the most common 1920s stamps that I’ve found.
Looking south on Clemens; the stamp is on the left, on Marcus.
