I know you’re thinking that I’m a little early for a change, but actually, I’m a lot late. Sorry about that. It’s finals week, also known as crunch time for professors. Anyway, here’s a couple of stamps from the entrance to an alleyway that runs from Marcus to Elizabeth Street, between Clemens and Fairview.
Here is a faded date with no name, or possibly one that had a name that is no longer visible. It’s at the southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street, on Marcus. I’m interested in it because I have found relatively few 1949 stamps, and because the typeface makes me think of a DPW stamp. I’m trying to narrow down when the DPW because the DPS and right now the earliest DPS stamp I’ve found has been 1950, but there is a possible 1947 one that is difficult to read.
Here’s a new(ish) Eastlund Concrete stamp from the house on the corner of southwest corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street. The house faces Magnolia, but this particular stamp is on Marcus. It looks like in addition to some sidewalk, Eastlund also redid part of the diagonal front walk. I like the way it heads for the corner instead of aiming straight forward to Magnolia. I’ve admired this house for a while because of the interesting multiple cladding on the front facade.
Checking the Belon Real Estate Collection at the Capital Area District Library’s local history collection, I find that the house was built in 1946. A photo of it in 1958 shows it in what I assume was its original paint scheme, with the second floor painted a much darker shade than the first, which adds even more interest to its face; it’s a shame more recent owners have painted it all the same color. Still, it is an attractive house marred by deferred maintenance, unsurprising since it is landlord-owned.
Continuing on another block east from my last entry, I found more new Eastlund Concrete stamps at the corners of Marcus Street and South Fairview Avenue. The newly constructed curb cuts are wider and nicer than what they replaced.
It’s good to know the tendency to ignore the sidewalk marking ordinance hasn’t spread to everyone yet. Good old Eastlund Concrete has copiously stamped the reconstructed curb cuts on every corner of South Magnolia Avenue and Marcus Street. I’d expect no less, since they’re one of only two contractors I’ve seen stamping anything over in Albion, too. I believe that the new sidewalk here is the result of utility work in the area.
This stamp, from the south side of Marcus Street between Clemens and Fairview, is a typical example of a Cantu & Sons stamp with the 1987 date corrected to 1988. There are a lot of ones like that around the neighborhood. The real reason I photographed it, though, was the odd graffiti, added as though an addendum to the contractor stamp: “The Butterfly.”
There is something else scrawled in the corner to the left, but I wasn’t able to make it out in the current light.
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).
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.
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.
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.
