Category: #LostEastLansing

A variation of this article, in tweet-thread form, was originally published in June 2022 as part of the #LostEastLansing project. Like many of those threads, it is a bit of a meander. Scattered around East Lansing are ten small apartment buildings of frame construction with brick veneer, containing six to eight one- and two-bedroom apartments.…

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

As East Lansing experienced rapid growth in the 1920s, a group of investors decided to establish the city’s second bank† to compete with the East Lansing State Bank (ELSB). The “Michigan State Bank at East Lansing” (MSBEL) was founded in January 1927 with a capitalization of $5,000—a modest sum given that more than a decade…

A tweet-stream version of this article was published in August 2022 as part of the #LostEastLansing project. As mentioned in the article about the College Grove plat, East Lansing’s Division Street was created when College Grove developers Horace Angell and Charles Chase sued to split their partnership and the resulting chancery decree called for a…

A tweet-stream version of this article was published in August 2022 as part of the #LostEastLansing project. In the 1976 book At the Campus Gate: A History of East Lansing, Max Skidmore Marshall (1897–1985), the son of Bacteriology Professor Charles E. Marshall, remininiced about growing up in East Lansing as one of the M.A.C. “campus…

Lulu M. and Iza Bell Smith, sisters born in Pennsylvania circa 1875 and 1877 respectively, moved with their parents to Michigan around the turn of the century and by 1910 were living with them in north Lansing. In 1913, the “Misses Smith” opened the Wildwood Tea Room in the newly completed apartment building of the same…