Historic Glaister House’s fate seems sealed: Demolition

FRIDAY, March 14 — The City Rescue Mission of Lansing will "most likely" demolish the historic Glaister House in downtown Lansing to make room for a rainwater detention pond, a spokesperson said today.

“I don’t want to give anyone false hopes” — demolition “most likely is going to happen,” said Laura Grimwood, the rescue mission’s senior director of community engagement.

A detention pond temporarily stores rainwater to keep it from flooding a sewer system until it can be slowly released.

The Glaister House, a 148-year-old red brick Queen Anne-style residence at the corner of Walnut and Kalamazoo streets in downtown Lansing, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2017. The rescue mission took possession of it last year in a non-cash transaction with its previous owner, Set Seg Insurance Services Agency Inc. The rescue mission purchased the insurance company’s adjacent property in 2024 at 415 and 422 W. Kalamazoo for a new facility to feed and shelter up to 300 homeless adults.

Grimwood called the house “not savable.” She cited myriad problems with plumbing, electrical, floors, ceilings, water in the basement, and so on.

Longtime preservation activist Dale Schrader and Bill Castanier, who heads the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, supported her description. They were part of a group, including state Capitol historian Valerie Marvin, that toured the house today to see what might be salvaged.

Schrader said he went on the tour “thinking there might be reason to save the house,” especially because of the exterior’s appearance. But what he found inside were “few things of value,” especially compared to his previous visit. He mentioned a newel post, the staircase and a green granite fireplace as still intact.

“It was stripped down,” he said. “There was a chandelier on the floor smashed. The room it was in was taped off with yellow tape.”

Castanier said little was left of historical value and that the original rooms had been chopped up to rent to tenants in the last century. He expressed surprise given the floor plan that the city had ever allowed it to operate as a boarding house. It did so until Set Seg bought it from the son of its longtime owner, the late Alice Sessions, after she died in 2018.

Grimwood said that “it was a really good thing to have the group come in today because they were familiar with the house.” She said having “their confirmation” of the house’s sad condition will assist the rescue mission in deciding its fate.

“We can’t invest the money in making the house livable,” Grimwood said. “We need to invest money in helping people.”

She cited efforts to offer the house to anyone who wanted to pay to move it. She said the mission’s executive director, Mark Criss, has had a number of people walk through, including today’s group.

Another factor working against it was that the house property has only two parking spots, making it unattractive for commercial purposes.

She said the organization’s focus from the beginning has been on the other two properties and that the “house just came along” with them. Only when the need for a detention pond became clear did the Glaister House become a factor.

She said the pond is needed to store rainwater run-off so it does not go into the city sewer system. If the city’s sewer separation system were farther along, the detention pond would not be necessary. But the system is too far in physical distance to tie into, she explained, and that it will be several years yet before it will be close enough.

She estimated that even with the cost of tearing down the Glaister House, putting a detention pond there would make more sense than any other location the rescue mission has identified. She estimated a $50,000 savings over the next best solution of underground water tanks beneath the new facility’s parking lot.

 And, she added, “We could have spent about $200,000 on this system" of underground tanks "and still have to either pay to hook up to the sewer separation later — or demolish the house and place a detention pond.”