This nice Moore Trosper sign is just west of the entrance drive of the Meridian Mall, on the north side of Grand River Avenue in Meridian Township. I like how the crisply-laid date makes it clear that they are using a modular stamp in which each digit can be replaced separately.
Here we are on the west side of Clifford Street between Kalamazoo and Marcus. It’s a good thing I found one clear enough to take a photo; most of the neighborhood sidewalks were obscured by a light layer of snow. This one just has a really nice, aesthetic frosting. It’s a variation of Moore Trosper I haven’t photographed yet, but it was really the pretty way the snow filled the impressions that caught my eye, truth be told.
This is the third Moore Trosper variation I have catalogued. It lacks the stylish flair of this version but is very similar to this one, differing only in the absence of the hyphen.
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.
Here is my first downtown stamp. It’s on the south side of West Ottawa Street between Capitol and Washington, next to the Anderson House Office Building. I actually stopped briefly during my Silver Bells Virtual 5K Walk to take the photo. I was hoping to find something more unusual downtown, but disappointingly all the ones I passed were fairly recent and familiar. This one is impressively clear and sharp, but unfortunately undated.
It’s interesting how some stamps seem more common in some areas than others. I noticed quite a few Moore Trosper (or Moore-Trosper as it is rendered here) stamps downtown, but they are very uncommon in the east side neighborhoods.
This is my first report from outside the east side. I had a virtual 5k to do which went from the Turner-Dodge House (in Old Town, on North Street) to the RE Olds Museum and back.
I took a few minutes after my race to do a quick look around the Turner-Dodge House for interesting sidewalk stamps. I was hoping to find something old or at least a company I haven’t seen yet in my walks around the east side. I didn’t find much on the sidewalk in front of the house (just two stamps from our friends from yesterday, BBRPCI, both dated 1993), but the sidewalk there all looked suspiciously newer. The sidewalk along James Street (to the east of the house) looked promisingly worn, but I didn’t find anything especially old there either. I did find one from 1988 with a name I hadn’t seen yet: Moore Trosper.
Moore Trosper are still in business. They’re a general contractor based in Holt, an unincorporated community south of Lansing. According to their Web site, they were founded in 1982 (making them a young company when this stamp was made) by Harold Moore and James Trosper, and are currently run by Moore’s sons.