I went to MSU’s campus for the first time in years today, and rambled around once-familiar places that now feel like somewhere remembered from a dream. Outside the Auditorium Road approach to my old haunt, South Kedzie Hall, I found this stamp.
I presume the TCI behind this is the one from Eaton Rapids, Michigan. Google reviews suggest it went out of business within the last couple of years.
This fortunately well-lit stamp is on the south side of Prospect Street between Pennsylvania and Eighth. There are a pair of them, and they appear to be handwritten. I had noticed this one before and found it curious, as X is an uncommon initial to appear in a contractor stamp.
I assumed it was a given name such as Xavier. Instead I have discovered that this is most likely the mark of Xtreme Mason Contractors of Laingsburg. Their slogan is “Xtreme Masonry: Fortified with Hell Bricks!”1
OK, no it isn’t. Their Web site says they are a 100% women-owned business, which might be a first for the blog, and that they specialize in commercial masonry repair and historic building restoration. They were founded in 2005.
1 I borrowed this joke from a Zippy the Pinhead comic from, I think, the late 1990s. I wish I could find it again. It involves a discussion of things being promoted as “extreme” and ends with Zippy declaring, “Extreme Oreos! Fortified with hell sugar!”
There are three Moore Trosper stamps on the east side of North Fairview Avenue just north of Michigan. This is a different, in my view nicer, design than other Moore Trosper stamps I have catalogued so far. The name is rendered without a hyphen this time; they are inconsistent about that.
The stamps are alongside the Arcadia Smokehouse, which I remember best for the period it spent as a vacant former PNC Bank whose parking lot people would sometimes use when the lot behind The Avenue filled up. A brief dive into old Lansing State Journal advertisements shows that the 1954 building spent a long time belonging to Bud Kouts, though as it is not adjacent to the main Bud Kouts (now Feldman) Chevrolet, it’s hard to picture how that worked.
There are three stamps in this stretch; one is a singleton and the other two appear to bracket a run of pavement.
