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.
It’s not extremely old by Department of Public Works standards, but I thought I should get this one in while I can. It’s on the dead-end 700 block of South Francis Avenue, on the west side, probably just south of where Harton Street would be if it still existed there. Across the street from it, the other side of Francis has had its sidewalk recently removed, as with many southern blocks in Urbandale. The sidewalk extends half a block or so further south on this side due to two remaining houses.
This stamp is on a half-sized slab of sidewalk in front of what looks like a vacant lot. In fact, as I discovered checking the city property records, the property south of this point encompasses not two but three lots, plus the vacated section of Harton! (Decommissioned streets seem to hang around in property descriptions, which fascinates me for reasons I can’t articulate.) Historicaerials.com shows Harton still existing here in 1981 but clearly gone in 1994.
Looking north on South Francis Avenue, with the stamp plainly visible. Harton would have been in view here when it existed.
Looking more or less south. Not sure why there’s a little section of undersized blocks (including the featured one).
I mistakenly thought that this pair of Department of Public Service stamps – on the west side of North Francis Avenue between Vine and Fernwood – had the earliest date I’d seen for a DPS stamp, which is why I photographed it. Checking later, I discovered I have previously done one other 1950 DPS stamp.
The southern stamp of the pair.
The northern stamp. It’s on the next lot north.
Looking north on North Fairview, with the southern stamp of the pair roughly in front of the house’s front steps.
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 isn’t a sidewalk or even a driveway. It’s a concrete pad on the Prospect Street side of the old L.F.D. No. 4 fire station (now home to the Davies Project). The building faces Bingham Street at the northwest corner of Bingham and Prospect.
It appears that at some point the concrete was covered with a layer of asphalt that has mostly worn away, letting the old stamp resurface. I like how it looks. 1942 is an especially common year for DPW stamps in the neighborhood, usually using the “old style” (1910s- early 1940s) stamp.
This is the old fire station. The stamp is on the right front corner of the concrete pad next to the building.
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.
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.
This stamp is on the west side of Kipling Boulevard, alongside Capital Imaging (which is located on East Michigan Avenue at Kipling). I have previously catalogued a George Hagamier stamp on the same stretch of sidewalk and written a little about the Capital Imaging building in the process.
The southern sidewalk stamp.
Stamp on the driveway.
This is the most recent example I have seen of the “1980s” style DPW stamp, and also therefore the latest use of the “DPW” name. The next style used appears to be the simple “O & M” stamps. Most of those are undated but I have found a few marked as 2005.
There are three stamps, one on either end of a run of sidewalk and one on the driveway in between.
The northern stamp. Looks like they had a false start. I recognize that kind of misprint from my rubber stamping hobbies.
The back corner of Capital Imaging. The southern stamp is by the side door, the northern one is in the foreground here, and the other one is in the middle of the driveway apron.
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.
This is the first 1970s DPW stamp I have found, and it’s on the east side of Bingham just south of Eureka, in a lovely patch of dappled shade. It’s in the style of the 1980s stamps I have previously collected.
The corner of Eureka and Bingham, looking northeast toward the back end of Sparrow. The stamp is at the lower right.
