Major renovations underway at Old Town’s Burchard Park

FRIDAY, June 6 — Five years ago, the Capital Region Community Foundation funded a feasibility study for a band shell in Old Town’s Burchard Park, in which business owners and residents had expressed interest. At the time, though, the cost was too high.

“We kind of put it on hold,” said Laurie Baumer, the foundation’s president and CEO. But three years later, Michigan’s Senate Appropriations Committee granted it $1.7 million to reimagine the Brenke Fish Ladder, half the project’s $3.4 million cost.

Two years later, construction has officially begun on the Fish Ladder Music Park, with expected completion by September. The renovations, which were inspired by the park’s yearly Dam Jam concert, will bring a permanent stage and seating to the venue and drive foot traffic to Old Town, Baumer said.

“A lot of artists that have been here before at Dam Jam really like the unique nature,” she said. “It’s not like anything you see in other places, and we wanted it to be a destination that people from even outside the community might come to because it’s so unique.”

The park will feature permanent, amphitheater-style seating from an elevated area down into the concrete incline, or the “fishbowl.” Colored lights embedded in the ground will illuminate the trees nightly, and metal instruments will be installed in an area with a fireplace and benches, giving the park a musical theme even when there is no performance. Covered benches will be installed overlooking the river.

The fish ladder itself will be unaffected by the renovations. Dam Jam is also expected to continue as usual, with renovations completing before the Sept. 26 concert.

The amphitheater-style seating is a major change from Dam Jam, whose audience sat on the stairs or around the fishbowl. It has also been a “tricky process” so far, according to Jerry Risch, site manager for the contractor, Lansing’s Wieland Corp.

“The concrete was kind of just floating,” Risch said. Building permanent seating within the fishbowl meant injecting around 22,000 pounds of structural foam underneath the floating concrete, filling about 11 feet of empty space underneath.

The seating will also increase accessibility for concerts at the Fish Ladder, with access points “going all the way down,” Baumer said, “and an ADA-accessible ramp behind it.”

A section of the fishbowl too steep for seating will instead feature a mural by local artist Brian Whitfield, whose other work includes murals at Allen Place and beneath the U.S. 127 overpass.

For Baumer, this is the third major park project the foundation has undertaken, after Rotary Park near the Shuffle and Play Michigan, the all-inclusive playground along Grand Avenue near Saginaw Street.

Baumer said the new park will be “a great amenity for Old Town,” driving traffic to local businesses. 

“When you look at Old Town, the one thing that it’s severely missing is a park,” she said. “So they really have adopted this park as their own, even though it’s a block away. This really is just expanding Old Town and giving residents and businesses what they need to complete.”

Baumer said the focus on riverfront parks was no mistake. After building Rotary Park and Play Michigan, reimagining the Brenke Fish Ladder was a logical next step.

“Other communities that have a river flowing right through their downtown capitalize on it,” Baumer said. “And we’ve turned our backs on the river, for decades, for centuries. This is an effort to slowly chip away at different parts of the downtown river to activate it.”

Jon Herrmann, the foundation’s operations manager, said he envisions the park as one day connecting Old Town with downtown.

“It’s only a one-mile stretch on that river from Old Town to downtown,” he said. “Down the road, I could see an opportunity for shuttles or golf carts to bridge those two together and just make a vibrant space that makes Lansing feel like there’s more to do.”

The music park is one of three venues Herrmann hopes to bring more traffic to, alongside an open area just outside Lansing Shuffle and the Rotary Park Hub, under the Shiawassee Street Bridge.

While he said it was too early to name specific events, Herrmann said all three could hold “concerts, theater productions, health and wellness events, dance performances, DJ events and even private events.”

Baumer said bringing a variety of events and performances to the park was integral to the vision.

“We knew if we were going to reimagine the fish ladder, we needed to make sure it would be used,” she said. “We didn’t want to pour all this money into the park if it wasn’t going to bring in more performances.”

A focus is to make it more user-friendly for performers.

“The electrical infrastructure will be more plug-and-play for musicians that have their own stuff,” Baumer said.

Prospective acts should reach out to the city of Lansing’s Parks and Recreation Department for permits, she said.

Baumer was careful to note that the renovation will bring value to Burchard Park whether there is a show or not.

“This isn’t just about performances,” she said, “because most of the time, there won’t be a performance happening. That’s why we wanted to make the whole park user-friendly for all ages.”