On Sunday I decided to walk around the Flowerpot neighborhood in East Lansing after dark, out of the belief that there might be a lot of Christmas displays still up there. This turned out to be a mistake on several counts: the neighborhood has few streetlights, so it was unsettlingly dark; only part of the neighborhood has sidewalks, and they were as perilously icy as the roads; and there were only a scant few Christmas displays. It was a pretty miserable walk, one that took nearly an hour despite covering only about a mile and a half of ground, and near the end of it I realized I had dropped my lens cap and couldn’t be bothered to retrace to look for it.

Still, I did have one success: I found an interesting sidewalk stamp that was near enough one of the few streetlights to register in a photograph. It’s a T L Contracting stamp, and while I’ve found one before, it was a lot plainer than this one. This one is on the north side of Marigold Avenue between Hicks and Larkspur.

This new T L stamp uses the modular style – I think of it as the “hamburger” – that a lot of more recent stamps share, including the more recent O & M stamps. It adds something I have never seen in another contractor stamp, the contractor’s phone number. It makes sense for them to use a stamp as advertising in this way, and I’m just surprised I’ve never seen it before. The phone number is a little hard to make out in this light but it is (517) 669-0600, which I can link with the T L Contracting (or as they actually style it, TL Contracting) located on Industrial Parkway in Lansing. They don’t have a Web site I can find, but they do have a Facebook page.

The last line seems to be “Lansing, MI” and a hard-to-read zip code, probably 48906, since that’s what their zip is. 48906. I find it odd to include the zip when they don’t have the rest of the address and I wonder if they thought “Lansing, MI” on its own just didn’t take up enough space on the line.