I found this very worn and craggy Lansing DPW stamp on Jerome Street, near the northeast corner of Jerome and Ferguson. The date is impossible to be certain about but it looks to me like something in the 1930s, possibley 1939, which is consistent with it being what I call a “second style” DPW stamp.
This is one of the “second style” of Department of Public Works stamps. It’s on the west side of Horton Street, just south of the intersection of Jerome. I recognized it mainly by the size and style, since it is so worn. The date is even worse. It’s just barely possible to make it out as 1935; it probably won’t be for too many more years.
I’m usually drawn to the clearest, sharpest stamps, but there is some value in capturing these very faded ones too.
I noticed this one (on the west side of Horton Street, north of Jerome) during waning light on my walk this evening and made the mistake of assuming that because it was so worn it must be old and interesting. It was totally illegible to me then, but I hoped I would be able to see something in the photo. Studying it afterward I could make out a date, 1944, but not the contractor’s name.
Then I remembered something. There are a lot of 1944 DPW stamps on Horton Street. I compared this one with a previous photograph and the numbers matched exactly. It’s not definite, but I will tentatively call this a Lansing DPW stamp. So it’s only old-ish, and not very interesting (or at least not unusual).
This Department of Public Works stamp is on the west side of Regent Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth (400 block). It’s a typical 1940s DPW stamp, quite worn. The date is hard to read and apparently harder to photograph.
That one isn’t too interesting on its own. What’s interesting is the matching one adjacent to it on the driveway apron of the property (see below).
This one is placed diagonally on the corner of the driveway apron, and the date is a lot clearer. This is interesting to me because although I’ve seen driveway aprons with stamps here and there, this is the first one I’ve noticed with a DPW stamp. I’m surprised that the DPW would have been involved in replacing someone’s driveway apron, unless some kind of city work is what caused it to need replacement.
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.
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.
At least I think it’s 1941. That’s what it looks like in person. It’s an extremely worn DPW stamp (I recognize it by the shape and typography of the letters), located on the east side of Regent Street (200 block) between Kalamazoo and Michigan. Funny how unevenly they have worn, given that there are 1930s ones on the same block that are much more legible.
Tired of Regent Street stamps yet? I hope not, because you’re probably going to get more of them. How about Department of Public Works stamps? Same there; I want to see if I can figure out when they transitioned from one style of stamp to the next over the years.
The slab is a small one, odd sized. You run across truncated ones like this, both older and newer, and I’m not sure how they come about.
Here’s an old DPW stamp, on the north side of Eureka Street between Lathrop and Clifford, and for a change I can read the month on it: May.
Figuring out when they quit stamping a month with the year will be interesting. It looks like they had already quit stamping the exact date, which they did at least through most of 1918.
This stamp, on the east side of the 300 block of Regent Street (between Kalamazoo and Michigan), is very worn and is more easily visible at certain times of day, especially on a sunny late afternoon. I’ve learned that just because I can’t read a stamp at first doesn’t mean I never will; sometimes it’s a matter of passing it at the right time. I really wanted a picture of this one despite my recent glut of Department of Public Works stamps because of its strange placement.
The great majority of stamps are centered, left-to-right, at the bottom of the slab. Occasionally they are at the top of the slab instead. But this is the only one I have seen like this, diagonal in a corner. I have seen plenty of similar DPW stamps, but all of them more conventionally placed. I wonder what happened here.
The date is difficult to read, but after seeing it in a few different lighting conditions and feeling it carefully with my fingers, I am pretty confident it is 1921. There seems to be a month stamped before the year, but it is illegible. Maybe someday I’ll walk past it at the right time.
One of my goals (besides finding the earliest and latest stamps I can, and I may have peaked too early on the former) is to find a stamp from as many different decades as possible. So here is an otherwise not particularly distinguished one I saw on my walk today to represent the 1950s.
Another one from the Department of Public Works, 195…7? 2? I initially thought 7, but it looks too rounded. On the other hand, there’s definitely no bottom bar to make it a 2. It’s on the east side of Shepard between Kalamazoo and Stanley Ct. (a curiously tiny, glorified alley between Shepard and Leslie).
Update 2/27/21: Based on seeing several others like this, I am now sure it’s 1952.
There are a half dozen or more stamps bearing a 1944 date on Horton St.’s northernmost block (between Jerome and the new Eastern High School). They caught my attention because I haven’t noticed 1940s dates anywhere else on my walks around the east side.
Horton is a nicely shady street with sturdy old houses. Its dead end is a little strange, since the street evidently used to curve around to join the Armory lot, but is now blocked with a rusty gate. The stretch of street past the gate still has wooden posts demarcating it and the pavement is visible though starting to succumb to weeds. I wonder how long it’s been inaccessible.
Most of the 1944 stamps have a clear, easy-to-read date, but a very worn name. I managed to find a legible one. It reads “Lansing D.P.W.” That would be Department of Public Works. Lansing no longer has a Department of Public Works (though East Lansing still does). I assume that it became the Public Service Department. One of the divisions of Public Service is Operations and Maintenance – so this stamp seems to be the 1940s version of the O&M stamps from the other day.
I wonder what was going on that Horton got so many new sidewalk slabs back in ’44?