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N. Clemens Ave., G.R. Montague, 1934

It turns out that the 300-600 blocks of North Clemens Avenue are a trove of contractor stamps I haven’t featured yet. I jotted down several on my last walk up that way and returned for one of them today, on the east side between Fernwood and Saginaw. It was my first walk of the year with no coat, since was in the mid-sixties outside. One house I passed had its entire front yard covered with crocus flowers, and a few bees were making the rounds. It was amazing and a bit unsettling to see this early in March.

So here is the stamp, the only one of its kind I have found so far. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to turn up any information about G.R. Montague. Nothing is showing up in old Lansing State Journals. My next approach if the stamp includes a person’s name is usually to start checking Find A Grave, but FindAGrave.com has been down all evening. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Looking north on North Clemens Avenue. The stamp is actually just below the edge of the photo.

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S. Clemens Ave., DPW, 1930

This is a pair of Department of Public Works stamps on the east side of South Clemens Avenue between Michigan and Prospect. There are a handful of them from 1930 on this stretch of Clemens.

The northern stamp of the pair.
The southern stamp.
Looking north on Clemens, with the southern stamp at lower left.
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S. Magnolia Ave., Lansing DPW, 1936

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.

Looking south on Magnolia. I believe I’m standing on the slab I photographed above. Note the several white colored slabs; those are all brand new ones from White Hawk.

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.

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Regent St., Lansing DPW, 1939

Continuing my project of cataloguing the changes in Lansing Department of Public Works stamps over the years, I present this very worn stamp on the east side of the 200 block of Regent Street, between Kalamazoo and Michigan. There are at least three 1938 or 1939 DPW stamps in that area, which makes me wonder a little bit about whether I have correctly dated that “1938” B.F. Churchill stamp nearby.

And, oh, yes: welcome to fall.

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Jerome St., George Hagamier, 1930

I have always paid attention to sidewalk stamps, but now that I’m actively looking for them for this blog, I keep seeing ones I thought would be harder to find. For instance, I had thought finding one from the 1930s would be difficult as I could not recall ever seeing one. On my walk today I realized there was a 1930 stamp right out in front of 1704 Jerome, the house I previously wrote about. This is on the south side of Jerome between Marshall and Horton (near the corner of Marshall). I stopped to look at it first because I saw that it was another George Hagamier stamp like the one I noted on the Marshall side of the property. Then I realized that instead of another 1929 stamp as I expected, it was from 1930.

Although 1704 Jerome was built in 1929 according to the city’s property records, this leads me to wonder if it was still being worked on into 1930 (likely by George Hagamier, who was a building contractor).

This stamp is much more worn and difficult to read than the quite neat and clear stamp on the Marshall side of the property, near the house’s gigantic garage. I don’t know how to account for that. Jerome doesn’t seem likely to receive any more foot traffic than Marshall, but maybe things were different in decades past.

The funny thing is that my walk later took me past a Lansing DPW stamp on Clemens that, if I’m reading it correctly, also read 1930.