Baker’s Switch — a vanished neighborhood

A variation of this article, in tweet-thread form, was originally published as part of the #LostEastLansing project in December 2022.

The area of Baker’s Switch, as it exists today. The purple line is the East Lansing city limit. Kircher Park, within the City of Lansing, has also been subdivided, but it too has no indication of its past use. Image Credit: East Lansing GIS.

I wonder what one calls a place that was once part of the local parlance but now no longer exists, and which has been so erased from the landscape that even its name is all but forgotten.

Baker’s Switch is one of those places.

Situated along Michigan Avenue between Lansing and East Lansing, it was around for only a few decades and was a hodgepodge of houses, businesses, small farms, and even a horseback riding academy. It does not appear on any map, neither today nor in the past, because its development was more circumstantial than planned.

When the streetcar line ran from Lansing east to the Agricultural College, and later through East Lansing to points beyond, to save time and money it was built as a single-track line.1

Scattered along the line were short segments of double track, to allow cars traveling in opposite directions to pass each other. The mechanism that shunted cars onto the side track became a metonym for the entire siding arrangement, so these locations were known as “switches.”

Excerpt from Chadwick Farm Atlas (1914), p. 1. Baker’s property is at top left, and the interurban railway appears as the black-and-white dashed line, though more accurately it ran along the south side of Michigan Avenue. Source: MSU Libraries, no longer online.

One of the switches on this line was on Michigan Avenue, somewhere east of what is now Clippert Street. The owner of the adjacent land was Benjamin B. Baker, so the switch was called “Baker’s Switch.” (Not that Baker owned the switch itself—it was on the railway right-of-way, south of his property.)

Since streetcars would have to stop on the siding to wait for opposing traffic, the switches became de facto stations on the line. That little bit of public transportation convenience gave the area around Baker’s Switch a focal point for development.

From around 1900 to the mid-1920s, landowners near Baker’s Switch began parceling out portions for residential and commercial use, and added side streets off Michigan Avenue that almost invariably were named for themselves, such as Eilenberg, Cooper, Church, and Frederick Streets.

At the time, the area was still outside the city limits of both Lansing and East Lansing—the annexations that would close the gap were still decades in the future—so the place needed a name. Naturally, the entire neighborhood became known as Baker’s Switch.

A 1918 advertisement that omits the possessive from “Baker’s,” which can be slightly confusing—another switch in Lansing, on the South Washington Avenue line at Baker Street, was also called “Baker Switch.” Image Source: LSJ, 17 Dec 1918, p. 15.

To recap, a piece of ordinary railway hardware, more or less arbitrarily placed for the purpose of streetcar operations, was the indirect impetus for an entire neighborhood’s development, and gave that neighborhood its name.

A later advertisement. Fred Harrison operated a riding academy at Baker’s Switch. He does not appear to have been related to the Harrison family, whose former property was at the eastern edge of Baker’s Switch. Image Source: LSJ, 13 Mar 1925, p. 30.

Unfortunately for the Baker’s Switch neighborhood, in 1925 the state highway department decided to widen Michigan Avenue into a boulevard, a project that met with some resistance. The state widened the road by about 130 feet to the south, and since most of the improvements of Baker’s Switch were located along that frontage, nearly all of it was condemned. All of the side streets mentioned above have since been vacated, although Reniger Court follows the same line as the former Frederick Street.

After that the neighborhood, or what was left of it, quickly vanished. The last mention of Baker’s Switch that I have found appeared in October 1932, mere months before the streetcar shut down. It referred to the railway switch itself, not its eponymous neighborhood—in the midst of a labor strike, someone tried to dynamite the tracks at the switch. No cars were on the line, damage was minimal, and fortunately no one was hurt.2

Ad for a traveling circus, one of many that used the Baker property—referred to here as the “Baker Circus Lot.” Image Source: LSJ, 2 Sep 1925, p. 6.

With the neighborhood gone and the streetcar out of service, the Baker’s Switch name was swiftly forgotten. Benjamin Baker’s property, which hosted several traveling circuses in the 1920s, was turned into a golf course by the early 1930s. In 1954, it became the Frandor shopping center.

  1. MAC Record, 13(19), 4 Feb 1908, p. 3. LSJ, 31 Jan 1911, p. 7. ↩︎
  2. LSJ, 31 Oct 1932, p. 1. ↩︎

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