Riverview (1891)

A hint of this story, in tweet-thread form, was originally published in March 2022 as part of the #LostEastLansing project.

Around late 1890, a trio of real estate companies began advertising in Detroit newspapers: the “State Land Company (Limited),” the “Grand Rapids Land & Improvement Company (Limited)” and the “Lansing Land & Improvement Company (Limited).” Each company shared the same principals: Cassius G. Robinson, president; G. A. Clement, vice-president; M. H. Bohreer, treasurer; and John R. Cochran, secretary. All three companies operated from an office in the Campau Building in downtown Detroit.¹

Two of these companies were capitalized at $50,000, but the Lansing entity stood out: its capital stock was listed as $250,000—a very large sum for the time.

In 1891, all three companies were highly active, advertising the sale or exchange of a variety of properties, including houses, city lots, and timberland across the state. In January, the Lansing Land & Improvement Company gained control of what the newspapers called “the 280-acre Bower farm.” Previously known as the “Peninsula Farm,” the land had been owned by Daniel G. Harrison before being sold to Caroline Bower in 1882. The company immediately sold the timber on the land to the Clippert & Spaulding brick company and, four months later, filed a plat dedication for “Riverview Nos. 1 & 2.”²

The best description this author can offer for the Riverview plat is this: land speculation insanity.

Riverview consisted of no less than 2,529 individual lots. The lots were tiny, measuring just 25 by 115 feet—less than seven one-hundredths of an acre. A typical freestanding foursquare house, only two rooms wide, would not have fit on a Riverview lot.^† It’s possible that the plat was designed for Philadelphia-style rowhouses, with a fifteen-foot-wide alley running through each block.

As shown in the images here, the platting ignored the existing landscape entirely: identical forty-lot blocks repeat ad inifinitum. Since the blocks did not divide evenly into the east-west dimension of the plat, the easternmost blocks were truncated at thirty-two lots. Its streets ran up to the riverbanks as if the river were an afterthought, leaving ten odd-shaped lots, most of which were only accessible from an alley.

At the top of page one, a “Scale of feet” appears, but the numbers on the scale are actually measured in rods. It might be the laziest plat ever drawn—if not for the ironic fact that the surveyor, H. D. Bartholomew, had to number each individual lot on the map.

Additionally, large portions of Riverview’s northern end were within the floodplain of the Red Cedar River. One can only imagine how soggy basements would become every spring thaw at the corner of its Michigan and First Avenues, or how busy Alger Avenue would have been as the only access to Harrison Road from the blocks in the oxbow of the river.

Fortunately, as far as anyone can tell, no part of Riverview was ever built. Despite the official plat filing, the subdivision does not seem to have been advertised for sale.

By January 1892, mentions of the State Land Company (Limited) in the Detroit Free Press had ceased. In March 1892, the Lansing company announced that it would open a local office in downtown Lansing, but this is the last mention of the company in any newspapers or city directories. The Grand Rapids company continued to advertise in the Grand Rapids Herald until July 1893, then it too disappeared.³

By October 1893, their former president Cass Robinson had gone solo, advertising “Real Estate and Pine Lands, Stocks, Bonds and Commercial Paper, Loans Negotiated.” However, those ads only lasted about one week. His fortunes appear to have declined rapidly after that, and when he died in 1914 at the age of fifty-nine, the Detroit Free Press scarcely mentioned his passing, his death notice being less than two lines long.⁴

In the years that followed, the Michigan Agricultural College acquired this land—some in 1900, the rest in 1913. Today, it’s the site of Old College Field, Spartan Stadium, Breslin Center, Munn Arena, Jenison Fieldhouse, South Neighborhood, and the Infrastructure Planning and Facilities department.

1. Michigan State Gazetteer (1891), p. 497. Detroit Free Press (DFP), 19 Nov 1890, p. 8. ↩︎
2. LSJ, 9 Jan 1891, p. 1; 19 Jan 1891, p. 1; 25 Apr 1891, p. 4. DFP, 3 Mar 1891, p. 6. ↩︎
3. DFP, 9 Jan 1892, p. 8. LSJ, 15 Mar 1892, p. 1. Grand Rapids Herald, 28 Jul 1893, p. 7. ↩︎
4. DFP, 18 Oct 1893, p. 7; 26 Oct 1893, p. 10; 7 May 1914, p. 15. ↩︎

1. † For example, the foursquare Rollo May House at 202 Collingwood Drive is twenty-four feet wide, so its eaves would have overhung the property line on both sides.↩︎