Old Town: North Lansing's Victorian Revival
Near Lansing, Michigan
The neighborhood just north of downtown along Grand River Avenue is called Old Town, and the name is accurate in both senses. It is genuinely old, and in the last two decades it has found a second life.
Old Town was originally called North Lansing, a separate village that predated the capital designation. When Lansing became the capital in eighteen forty-seven, North Lansing's commercial district grew quickly alongside it, serving the workers, craftsmen, and merchants who followed the government inland.
The buildings that line Grand River Avenue today are the largest surviving collection of Late Victorian commercial architecture in Lansing. Two- to four-story brick structures with Italianate details, corbelled cornices, and arched windows were standard in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. The North Lansing Historic Commercial District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-six.
By the late twentieth century the district had declined badly. Vacancy rates reached ninety percent. Then in nineteen ninety-six the neighborhood joined Michigan's Main Street program, a preservation-based economic development model. Over the following two decades vacancy dropped to roughly ten percent. Independent restaurants, galleries, music venues, and boutique retailers filled the Victorian storefronts.
Old Town today hosts an annual art festival drawing tens of thousands of people and is routinely cited as one of Lansing's most successful neighborhood revivals. The Brenke Fish Ladder sits at its northern edge, where the Grand River still runs past the same buildings where workers once crossed on their way to the Capitol.
