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LPW, Rolling Brook Ln., 1968?

A little further south on Rolling Brook from my last entry, still on the west side, I found more LPW stamps. This one is on the sidewalk proper and this time the date appears to be 1966 or 1968 – thanks to the curvy font it’s hard to be sure. I have noticed that stamps from this era often use this same typeface for dates even when it’s a different contractor and even when the typeface used for the name is dissimilar. Sadly, I still have no insight as to who LPW is.

The house this stamp is in front of was built in 1967, according to East Lansing’s online property records.

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Rolling Brook Ln., East Lansing, LPW, illegible date

I continued further south after finding the C.E. Schneider stamp from my last entry and finally hit something entirely new to me, again on the west side of the street, north of Red Leaf Lane. This is on a driveway apron and the date is unfortunately mostly illegible.

If it were in Lansing I might suspect LPW was another variation on Lansing DPW/DPS (Department of Public Works/Public Service) but as this is in East Lansing that can’t be it. I really don’t know who or what LPW is. After noticing this one, I went a bit further and found several more houses with the same stamps on their driveways, arranged on either side of the seam between the two blocks making up the large driveway apron.

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Rolling Brook Ln., East Lansing, C.E. Schneider, 1968

Apologies for missing my usual Monday entry this week. It’s midterm grading season and I’m run ragged, which also accounts for why this post is coming at 3:30 in the morning.

Continuing with last week’s exploration of the Pinecrest neighborhood near Lake Lansing and Coolidge, I tried walking further south on the curiously dead-ended street. I discovered its name to be Rollingbrook Lane, or so I thought based on the street sign, which appears to render it as one (cramped) word. Google Maps says it is two words and so does the city’s online property database. I was hoping to find some older and possibly unusual stamps. I knew the 1980s and 2000s stamps I had been finding could not date to the development of the subdivision, since the houses had a 1960s look to them.

Once I got south of Red Leaf Lane, I found a stamp of the appropriate vintage on the west side of the street. It’s hard to read but I recognize it as a C.E. Schneider stamp. I find a lot of those from right around this same year, 1968, which is also the year of the house this is in front of. I always like when I find a stamp of the same date as the building it’s in front of, suggesting it dates to the original construction. Still, I continued walking in hope of finding a new-to-me stamp.

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W. Lake Lansing Rd., E.R. Premoe, 1987

I more or less randomly picked a new neighborhood to look at today, mainly because it was on my way home from work. Originally I wanted to see if there was anything interesting on Harrison near West Lake Lansing Road, but on my way there I happened to see a cul-de-sac I hadn’t noticed before. Its dead end is so close to the south side of Lake Lansing that they almost intersect. I made the next turn and wove my way through seemingly endless meandering subdivision streets until I eventually found my way back to it. It turns out to be Rollingbrook Lane. I walked around near the end of it a little, but the only stamps I found were several 2007 Able stamps. They were on obvious replacement slabs. Most of the neighborhood, however, had the pebblier style of concrete I’ve come to associate with midcentury stamps. Disappointed, I walked up to Lake Lansing Road to see if I could find anything interesting there.

There I found an older stamp from E.R. Premoe (and lots more Able 2007), but nothing too interesting. I did get a nice sunset view of the Coolidge Court strip mall and its modernist architecture. Though Rollingbrook does not intersect Lake Lansing as far as cars are concerned, the two streets do have a corner – a sidewalk corner.

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Marigold Ave., East Lansing, T L Contracting, 2021

On Sunday I decided to walk around the Flowerpot neighborhood in East Lansing after dark, out of the belief that there might be a lot of Christmas displays still up there. This turned out to be a mistake on several counts: the neighborhood has few streetlights, so it was unsettlingly dark; only part of the neighborhood has sidewalks, and they were as perilously icy as the roads; and there were only a scant few Christmas displays. It was a pretty miserable walk, one that took nearly an hour despite covering only about a mile and a half of ground, and near the end of it I realized I had dropped my lens cap and couldn’t be bothered to retrace to look for it.

Still, I did have one success: I found an interesting sidewalk stamp that was near enough one of the few streetlights to register in a photograph. It’s a T L Contracting stamp, and while I’ve found one before, it was a lot plainer than this one. This one is on the north side of Marigold Avenue between Hicks and Larkspur.

This new T L stamp uses the modular style – I think of it as the “hamburger” – that a lot of more recent stamps share, including the more recent O & M stamps. It adds something I have never seen in another contractor stamp, the contractor’s phone number. It makes sense for them to use a stamp as advertising in this way, and I’m just surprised I’ve never seen it before. The phone number is a little hard to make out in this light but it is (517) 669-0600, which I can link with the T L Contracting (or as they actually style it, TL Contracting) located on Industrial Parkway in Lansing. They don’t have a Web site I can find, but they do have a Facebook page.

The last line seems to be “Lansing, MI” and a hard-to-read zip code, probably 48906, since that’s what their zip is. 48906. I find it odd to include the zip when they don’t have the rest of the address and I wonder if they thought “Lansing, MI” on its own just didn’t take up enough space on the line.

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Narcissus Dr., East Lansing, BBRPCI, 2001

Yesterday I made a largely failed attempt to scout a new neighborhood for interesting stamps. I decided to go to the Flowerpot neighborhood, which I had heard of but never been to before, to the best of my recollection. It is a cluster of streets mostly named for flowers (hence the name) located at the western edge of East Lansing south of Kalamazoo. This little pocket of land is an area of town that has always been vague and fuzzy in my mental map of Lansing. I tend to think of Kalamazoo as leaving the east edge of Lansing, going through a sad little slice of Lansing Township near the freeway overpass, and then just cutting through a short, indistinct area of nothing before getting to MSU. The Flowerpot neighborhood is hidden away in that “short, indistinct area” which isn’t quite as “nothing” as my mental map makes it out to be.

I thought it would be interesting to see the neighborhood and perhaps find stamps that are contemporary to the development of the streets, but my trip wasn’t so lucky. First of all, nearly all the streets are marked as no parking at any time on both sides, so a quick stop on my way home from work turned into a parking hassle. Second, I quickly discovered that most of the streets have no sidewalks (and no curbs either, giving it a rural look). Only the two longest ones, Marigold and Narcissus, have sidewalks. Third, on a short walk as dusk started to settle in, I wasn’t able to find any interesting stamps. Most were Able or L & L stamps from the 90s and 2000s. I finally had to give up and shoot this BBRPCI stamp on the west side of Narcissus Drive, between Lilac Avenue and Daisy Lane, before I ran out of light.

Still, it was interesting to see the neighborhood, and it struck me that it seems like it is probably a great place to trick-or-treat. ELi (East Lansing Info, the East Lansing digital newspaper) has an interesting article on the history of the Flowerpot neighborhood. The article explained something that puzzled me on my visit, which is why all the streets were named for flowers except the theme-breaking “Hicks Drive.” It was originally the Hicks farm until the Hicks family began selling lots from it in the 1920s.