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. They were built between 1948 and 1951, and they are all almost exactly alike.
Most were built in pairs, often as mirror images of each other, and over the years a surprising number of them became houses for fraternities, cooperatives, and other student organizations. For example the earliest, built at 242 North Harrison Road and completed in 1948, has been the Triangle fraternity house since 1964. Its partner to the south has been home to Phi Kappa Sigma and Alpha Epsilon Pi, and is now Apollo co-op.
A quartet of them were built in 1949 at the north end of Louis Street. They got a lot of ballyhoo in the Lansing State Journal at the time, a fragment of which is shown here. One of the four, 243 Louis, was home to Evans Scholars from the late 1950s until about 1987, when they built their current home on Grand River Avenue.
Three of the Louis Street apartments, including the former Evans Scholars house, were removed in 2007 for the monolithic 241 Louis development. The surviving one, at 231 Louis, housed Alpha Kappa Psi for a couple of years in the 1960s. They later moved a block south to another of these apartments from 1950, 123 Louis, where they remain today.
Two were built on Whitehills Drive in 1951. Bower House co-op has been at 127 Whitehills since the 1960s. Bower’s nearly identical next-door neighbor, 131 Whitehills, remained an ordinary apartment house until the Spartan Housing Cooperative took over its management in 2019. For a while it was informally called “Left Bower,” a joking reference to euchre, M.S.U.’s perennial-favorite card game. SHC purchased it in March 2023 and a year later announced its availability as “All Nations,” a name that was first used by a short-lived cooperative that rented a house at 312 Albert Street from 1948 to 1950.1
Other examples of this apartment block design include 217 and 227 Bogue Street, both home to fraternities in recent years; and 122 and 134 Durand Street, now unified by a recent addition.
These apartment buildings caught my attention because of the many different student groups that have called them home. What I find ironic about them is that while their human history may be interesting, architecturally they are anything but. They are bland, utilitarian. Almost aggressively devoid of style. They are such carbon copies of each other that they could have been built from the same set of blueprints.
But the odd thing is, each one is a little bit different, their wall dimensions differing by a foot or two. Not much, but enough to make their total square footage range by more than three percent. Even in situations where two apparently identical (or mirror-image) buildings stand side by side, they are not necessarily the same size—only the pairs on Harrison and Bogue are true mirrors of each other.
In fact, among the ten buildings that remain, there are nine unique footprints. Only 123 Louis and 131 Whitehills match exactly. Their builder, H. T. Graham, might have been able to tell us why they were not built as the cookie-cutter boxes they appear to be. But he died in 1985.
Herbert Taylor Graham (M.S.C. ’31) was born 1905 at Grass Lake and earned two degrees from Michigan State College: a bachelors degree in Applied Science, followed by a masters degree in Physics in 1932. As an undergrad he rebuilt the WKAR radio broadcast transformer, “a difficult undertaking in applied electrical engineering.”2
He worked as a radio operator aboard the ocean liner RMS Empress of Asia, then taught high school math and physics, first at Ludington and then at East Lansing. It comes as no surprise that he sponsored the E.L.H.S. Radio Club (ham radio callsign W8QNC) which he helped to organize in 1936.
Around 1940 he started the H. T. Graham Construction company. For three decades Graham was a prolific builder in the greater Lansing area—mostly residential and commercial, but also public works like the Eaton County jail and East Lansing’s Pinecrest elementary school (both 1961).
In 1957, Herbert Graham married Sibilla Louise Merten. She was a Central Michigan alumna, teacher at Lansing’s Maplewood elementary school, and co-founder (along with her brother Leo) of the Merten Insurance Agency. A few years prior to Sibilla’s marriage to Herbert, the Merten siblings built an office for their agency called the Merten Building, 935 East Grand River (1953). This midcentury gem by Lansing architects Lee and Kenneth C. Black is delightfully unaltered today, and even has its “Merten Building” letters intact.
Two doors to the west is Sibilla and Herbert’s first joint effort, the Merten–Graham Building at 919 E. Grand River—another neat little slice of 50s/60s modernism which was completed in 1960. Today, both buildings and several others nearby are still owned by Merten descendants.
As a sideline to his construction company, Herbert Graham returned to his radio roots in 1961, establishing a pair of stations with the callsign WMRT: a daytime-only AM at 1010KHz, and an FM at 100.7MHz, which at 61,700 watts was the most powerful transmitter in the state. He sold the stations just a year later, finding their day-to-day operation to be too stressful for his health.
WMRT changed owners again in 1964 and its callsign a few years later. The AM station shut down in 1997. But while the FM station is no longer the most powerful in the state, it’s still going strong as WITL 100.7 FM, Lansing’s most popular country music station.
- SHC Instagram post. The Record, 55(4), 1 Jun 1950, p. 4. ↩︎
- Ludington Daily News, 16 Nov 1930, p. 3. ↩︎
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