Victor Cager has been running his thrift stores in Logan Square for two years now. He’s seen businesses come and go. One of his stores sells everything for a dollar. At the other, everything is $20 or less.
“It’s here to benefit the community,” he said Friday, between unloading more inventory. The 33-year-old recalls one of the brief revivals of Logan Square, when there was a pet store, a Rite Aid — where his one-dollar thrift operates now — and Big Lots. “We need this to be like that again. It can be, it should be.”
The 30-acre site is a relic from the heyday of the American automobile era six decades ago. A time when gasoline was cheap. The auto industry was booming, fueling a rising middle class. The gleaming site served a population on the move to a more suburban lifestyle and away from more densely packed neighborhoods.
Now the parking lot is riddled with potholes. Multiple storefronts are empty. Decay is evident.
But city leaders and residents say re-energizing Logan Square is critical to jumpstarting an economic revolution on a southside stretch of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
To get there, the city created a South MLK Jr. Blvd. Corridor Improvement Authority. In December, the City Council approved $1.2 million to beautify the stretch from Victor Avenue on the north to Interstate 96 on the south. The authority captures a small portion of taxes from all the properties along the way. The authority has hired contractors to assess the commercial future of Logan Square. New property owners Logan Capital LLC kicked in $15,000 of the $100,000 being used to fund the study that includes a look at market needs, traffic patterns, residential demographics and community input sessions.
The first of those sessions was held in Logan Square on Jan. 31 in an unused storefront. An estimated 150 people showed up for the two-hour conversation, among them residents, Lansing City Council members, newly elected Ingham County Commissioner Myles Johnson and Mayor Andy Schor.
When Logan Center opened in 1962, it was one of two large retail centers in the area. The other was Frandor. It cost $3 million to build.
“Acres of paved, lighted and free parking,” the grand opening newspaper ad trumpeted. The 2,500 parking spaces served 20 stores, including Woolworth’s, Arlan’s discount department store and a bank.
A year after the center opened, the state began construction on Interstate 496. The path of the new connecting highway sliced the city in half and decimated the city’s historic Black economic center. Refugees from the construction moved to newer developments in south Lansing, including Churchill Downs, a middle-class neighborhood two miles west of Logan Center.
The shopping center was featured in a 1963 series of stories, including in Life Magazine, when Rajjee, a “dancing Asian elephant” that was part of a circus at Logan Center, rebelled against its trainer. Rajjee rampaged through Arlan’s, then escaped from the shopping plaza. A crowd estimated at 3,000 people chased her through the city for two miles and up toward Everett High School, trampling one man along the way, until Lansing police fatally shot her.
In 1969, both Meridian and Lansing malls opened. By the ‘80s, Logan Square, as it was renamed then, was in decline.
In the ‘90s, Kroger’s and Rite Aid, two anchor businesses, pulled up stakes. Rite Aid had moved to a stand-alone building business model. Kroger moved kitty corner to a space on the southeast corner of MLK Boulevard and Holmes Road.
A Preuss family-owned pet store — Animal House — closed in December 1993 when a fire ripped through the store in the middle of the night. Just hours before the fire, the last puppy was sold. The store was a complete loss, but some animals, including Fred and Ginger, the red-footed tortoises that live at Preuss Pets in Old Town, survived. Both had burns from melted plastic that had dripped onto them. The fire in the pet store landed Logan Square in national tabloids reporting on how Penny Preuss revived a python from the fire by giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
The property is now on at least its fourth owner. Frandorson Properties, which owns Frandor Shopping Center on the city’s eastside smack dab between Michigan State University and the city of Lansing, owned the property in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Franderson handed the Logan Square Property over to JP Morgan Chase in 2000. In 2003, the bank sold the property Merram Properties for $3.3 million. And in 2018, Merram, under pressure from the city to address blight issues and revitalize the shopping center, sold the property to Logan Capital LLC for $2.8 million.
While Merram sank some cash into upgrades on the buildings, it ignored the property to the point that city officials began hammering the shopping center with building and code violations. City records dating back to 2014 through this year show 44 code issues for which the property has been cited. There were numerous window board-ups in the months leading up to the sale to Logan Capital LCC.
Schor said the city contemplated purchasing the sea of asphalt and outdated buildings several years ago.
“The property owners just wanted far more money than we could put in,” he said.
The purchase would have solved two problems, the mayor said. First was dealing with a property owner who was uncooperative with city attempts to bring the facility up to code and increase occupancy. Secondly, buying Logan Square would have put the city in the driver’s seat on reimagining and reviving the site.
Logan Square has fallen into disrepute over the years, most recently serving as a beacon for illegal gambling operations and at one point housing a shop that was a front for heroin distribution. Many storefronts are unoccupied and the parking lot is crumbling. Amazon Prime stored its delivery vans in a fenced-in area in the middle for a while. For years, the overhead lights in the parking lot did not work, causing trepidation and concern by city officials, visitors and law enforcement.
Finding a creative solution to Logan Square poses unique challenges in some ways. It’s a vast sea of asphalt, with the tens of thousands of square feet of obsolete strip mall storefronts and an aged infrastructure set back well beyond view from Martin Luther King Boulevard, where thousands of vehicles shoot by at 45 mph or more every day.
Mike Zhang is a California resident. His company owns other locations similar to Logan Square on the West Coast. When his company purchased the property, he said they saw the potential.
Zhang joked that he spends so much time in Lansing trying to improve the property and lure new businesses that he “lives in Lansing now, or at least I should.”
As consultants began asking participants on Jan. 31 what businesses and uses they imagined for property, the ideas came in a flurry of callouts. But it began with a clear message of what was not wanted.
“No self-storage!” came a shout, supported by others. MLK has seen development recently, but it has been the repackaging of a building that once house the call center for Electronic Data Systems. It’s now a self-storage unit. Just south of MLK and Holmes, past a Walgreens, is another self-storage unit that has expanded since its inception.
Carrington Kelsey, 31, has lived in Lansing for 11 years. He grew up in Detroit and witnessed the beginning of what politicians have hailed as the revival of the city through massive investments and new construction. Critics have called it gentrification. Kelsey said he doesn’t want to see that happen at Logan Square.
“My biggest fear is that it will push out Black and brown people in this area,” he said. “When you look into the data of where new developments are happening you see gentrification happening. I don’t want that.”
He wants to see a commitment from the developers that they will reinvest in the community and prevent gentrification.
“There can be equitable ways in developing a community. But that starts with the people being involved,” Kelsey said. “It’s important to make sure that is equitable from the perspective of the people who are going to be impacted here.”
The word “gentrification” was used more than once.
“I just don’t see that happening here,” Schor responded. “There is a great mix of housing in the area. But we certainly need to be aware of the concerns. I won’t let that happen, however. This is not about pushing people out, it’s about bringing people in.”
As the night wore on Jan. 31, more business ideas were thrown out.
Some wanted thrift stores, a hardware store and eateries. Others wanted the parking lot transformed into a space for exercise. Others noted the potential to connect Logan Square with Ferguson Development Co.’s redevelopment of the old Pleasant Grove Elementary School, which Malcolm X attended.
In the last year, two thrift stores have opened in Logan Square. The former Pizza Hut became a seafood boil place as the pandemic slowed. That failed, but it’s been replaced by a burgers and wings place.
That’s where Third Ward Councilman Adam Hussain sat down for an interview about the future of the center, which he has consistently raised as problematic since his first election, in 2016. Hussain has been a cheerleader for reinvesting in southwest Lansing.
His advocacy and community work have revitalized and shifted the picture of the formerly troubled intersection of Holmes and Pleasant Grove Road. A small strip mall there had become a refuge for illegal drinking and parties. Several shootings occurred there. But working with nearby residents and businesses through the Southwest Action Group, the city and community have installed artwork in a community square, increased foot traffic from nearby housing and brought a renewed sense of safety to the area.
Hussain dismissed concerns about gentrification. “First of all, I am a person of color, and that is not a concern I have for this,” said Hussain, a Pakistani American. He points to the progress being made at the Pleasant Grove and Holmes strip mall as evidence that economic viability can return without gentrification.
“That’s all important,” he said. “We didn’t push anyone out of there except for those who were there with bad intentions.”
He sees it as the kind of community-driven model that will benefit a new Logan Square for this century.
“Investment encourages more investment,” said Aurelius Christian. The 24-year-old lifelong Lansing resident is a full-time employee of the Lansing Economic Development Corp. focusing on the city’s four commercial corridors. But the MLK Corridor is the one he cut his teeth on while finishing college. It’s the one he knows the most about as a result.
During that Jan. 31 meeting, community members often spoke about making Logan Square a place where people want to come together on foot or bike, not by car, utilizing an overgrown strip of land stretching from MLK Boulevard to Pleasant Grove Road, similar to how the River Trail knits neighborhoods together. Today, homeless people live there.
“That’s a really important part of this,” said Schor, “connecting those neighborhoods in new ways. Ways that move away from the fast-moving traffic but also encourage healthier activity.”
Cager smiled broadly at the idea of energizing the square as a place to “do things.”
“That’s it,” he said. “People will come here. They have before and they will again, but they need a reason. Right now, that reason isn’t here.”
He motions to the L-shaped main structure on the property.
“There’s what? Ten storefronts being used here? There’s so much potential,” he said. “I believe in it.”
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