This very worn Department of Public Works stamp is on the front walk of a house on the north side of Larned Street between Holmes and Jones. The last digit is a little hard to read but I think it’s 1926. Another DPW stamp across the street, similarly hard to read, I had previously decided was probably 1926, and stamps tend to come in clusters like that. The stamp is what I call the “first style” of DPW stamps, which were used from the teens through the forties.
What’s curious about this one is that it’s on a house’s front walk, not a public sidewalk. I have seen DPW stamps on driveway aprons before (presumably replaced during road or utility work) but this is the only one I have seen on a front walk. I am assuming it must have been damaged by utility work for the city to have gotten involved.
This one is on the north side of Prospect Street between Eighth and Pennsylvania. The stamp is a clear example of the “second style” of Department of Public Works stamps. The date is much harder to read and it took me a second trip in better light before I made out enough of it to tell at least the decade. It is definitely a 1920s stamp and I am fairly confident it is 1926.
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.
Here’s another old Department of Public Works stamp, on the north side of Vine Street, west of the corner of Hayford.
The crosswalks at this intersection have recently been painted with a confetti-like pattern. Apparently someone received a small grant from the Arts Council to make this happen.
Looking at the Hayford crosswalk over Vine with the stamp visible to the lower right.
Another look at the crosswalk. All four of them have been painted similarly.
This neighborhood, down near the railroad tracks and I-496, is a short walk from my house, but I haven’t explored it thoroughly yet. I will probably correct that soon, since I’m getting a bit bored with my usual rambles. The neighborhood was developed by the Lansing Improvement Company and has many interesting old houses. Check out some old Lansing Improvement Company letterhead courtesy of the Capital Area District Library’s digital local history collection. There are some names you may recognize on there, including Edward W. Sparrow, Eugene Cooley, and one Horatio H. Larned.
I love how the moss has filled in some of the letters. Based on close inspection and feeling it with my fingers I think the date is 1926.
This stamp is on the south side of Larned between Jones and Holmes. There is a stretch of sidewalk here, but no homes on this side of the street. Instead there is a park-like area behind which I-496 looms. I was surprised to find sidewalk here, since as I have noted, blocks or side of blocks with no houses commonly have no sidewalk. I deduced that this side of the street once had houses, and they were probably removed during the 496 project. Afterward I checked HistoricAerials.com and that confirmed my theory.
Looking southeast toward the 496 overpass.
It’s surprising that the sidewalk was never removed in the intervening years, given how they have been tearing sidewalk out of the depopulated blocks of Urbandale. It doesn’t serve much purpose now. It stops suddenly before reaching any useful destination, and anyone actually trying to get somewhere on Larned will surely be walking on the other side, where the remaining houses are. For some reason they just never decided to pull it out, despite it being an orphaned vestige since the late 1960s. The most recent stamps on it are a pair of E.F. Sheets stamps from 1963. I expect they won’t bother repairing anything there again.
Looking east so as to give a better view of where the sidewalk suddenly ends.
Here’s a faded old Department of Public Works stamp on Elizabeth St., at the southwest corner of Allen and Elizabeth. It’s next to a house that kept my spirits up by leaving their Christmas lights, including a tree on their screened porch, up well past Christmas. I used to walk to Allen specifically because of a few houses on the street that still had lights until the end of January or so.
It’s funny now that I used to think 1920s stamps were a big deal. They’re actually fairly common. It doesn’t stop me from trying to catalogue them all, though. 1930s and later is really where I draw the line and say “I don’t need that one” if it’s not an unusual contractor.
This one caught my eye between its 1926 date, its nice design, and its jaunty diagonal placement, so I had to capture it even though it is actually on the edge of someone’s driveway. That’s a first for the blog, I think, though I’ve done driveway aprons before. It’s placed in the lower right corner of a driveway on the north side of Vine just east of the corner of Clemens. It belongs to the house on that corner. I took a couple of photos, one with and one without flash, figuring I would be able to work out the contractor’s name when I got home. It was dark, and it’s often easier to look at what the camera saw than use my own eyes in that kind of light.
When I got home I was mildly dismayed to discover that it’s the same mysterious contractor I previously wrote about, and the name is no more legible this time. If anything, it’s worse. I had taken it to read “E. Schullberger” before, but could not find anyone by that name when searching old Lansing State Journals, which makes it suspect. Update 5/9/21: I now believe this to be E. Schneeberger.
Looking east on Fairview. The stamp is just left of bottom center, in the bottom right corner of the presumed original driveway. The car is parked on an additional (asphalt) paved area that appears to be a later addition.
The flash didn’t prove illuminating, but here it is with.
As sometimes happens, I had already photographed something else (something on my “to do list”) when I stumbled across this one later on my walk. I decided to bump the other one to another time. This one is on the south side of Vine Street between Fairview and Clemens.
I am quite sure this one is from the 1920s and fairly confident the date is 1926. I thought at first that the contractor’s name was totally illegible, but upon studying the photograph I think I see “E Schullberger.” Searching the Lansing State Journal for that name gets me nothing, so I could very well be wrong. I would welcome alternate suggestions to research. Update 5/9/21: I now believe this to be E. Schneeberger.
Looking west on Vine Street. That’s Clemens in the distance.
