To diminish Lansing’s mental health crisis, save old Eastern High

(The writer is a professor in the Romance and Classical Studies Department at Michigan State University. A masked gunman broke into his class on Feb. 13, 2023, killing two of his students and injuring five others.)

Looking back, Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon, a former president of Michigan State University, missed a great opportunity in 2013 when she allowed immediate monetary factors to determine the value of one of the oldest and most handsome academic buildings on the Campus of MSU, Morrill Hall, and agreed to demolish it.

I call it a mistake because it was. Buildings are not independent of their surroundings, but integral parts of them. A city is more than the aggregate of its parts, or the monetary value of each of its buildings; a city is the articulation of those parts, and that itself adds exponential value to the surroundings.  In the case of MSU under President Simon, Morrill Hall was more than just an old building that was more costly to fix than to build a new one; it represented the opportunity to enhance more the character not only of the MSU campus, but of the community of East Lansing as a whole, and even economic opportunities that were missed. Turning Morrill Hall into a museum focused on MSU’s past to pair it with the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum’s focus on futurism would have tripled the interest in either of those two buildings alone. To experience two such very different exterior and interior spaces within a block and a half walking distance of each other would have added a stronger statement to the MSU campus architectural landscape and added a clear sense of homecoming to many people in October; let alone all the different economic possibilities Morrill Hall and its unique rooms offered to the university besides classroom space. And by that I mean character that other similarly prestigious campuses exude while ours could have benefitted from more. The high ceilings, grand halls and multiple rooms with fireplaces could have served as club space, event and fair space, shops and unique conference space that is not made of steel and glass and therefore so institutionalized and lacking in character — an attractive alternative with the right publicity.

In an era where downtowns across the United States have for the most part disappeared, pushed by the drive to demolish and build new, atomizing and dividing communities into disjointed suburbs, the tide might just be turning, and we may feel nostalgia, wishing the old downtown buildings were still standing. Instead of adding more and more new and impersonal steel and glass architectural cubes appearing everywhere in the globe, making each city indistinct one from the other perhaps only with the exception of size, we could help save part of what is left of Lansing’s character. Traditional dogmatic economic theories based on growth may be showing their clay feet by now. Under this form of thinking, the harmonious skyline of East Lansing was altered in the last decade, and not for the better, I might add. We then rush to spend billions on vacations to sites that have conserved a connection to their past, a continuity upon which their identity is built. If those places we pay to visit followed our form of thinking, Rome, Paris, Florence, Venice would have been razed to the ground to build new and modern buildings, severing ties to the history that has brought them and us here.

Demolishing and building new seems to have been the vision of the 20th century, of the “progressive” modern architecture started by Le Corbusier and the functionalist movement a century ago. But some mistakenly still today continue to think that that is the vision for the 21st century. Our planet and communities are not going to make it into the future if we do not learn somehow to have sustainable growth, and perhaps even learn to live with little or no growth; something which may not work for capitalism, though it would for humanity as many of the inequalities of society have not been solved by capitalist economic growth. On the contrary, along with rapid economic growth has come the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, increasing disparities globally that have certainly become visible in Lansing at every streetlight. 

Engaging in new building projects, dissociated from the past, is not necessarily the solution of the new century.  Rather, repurposing what we do have (an approach clearly adopted by some innovative industries), especially when it has historic and much aesthetic value, may save us from the neurosis and psychosis of today’s modern life. The aesthetic value of a majestic building could play a much-needed part in the dire mental health crisis in the city of Lansing. There is an undeniable connection between aesthetic beauty, serenity, inner peace and calmness so lacking in our modern world. Mental health institutions attempt offering this, though unsuccessfully, committing people inside new, impersonal buildings made of steel and thick glass.

Lansing has suffered from a lack of center, a lack of an integrated community, and mental health is not disconnected from that deficit here as we experienced it in my own classroom on Feb. 13 on the campus of MSU a year ago. We created disconnected, fragmented, centerless cities for segregated communities in the last half of the 20th century, leading to the flight to the suburbs, and leaving a void in inner cities for those in society we are least concerned with, the homeless and the mentally ill.

The Eastern High School building could be a great opportunity, not yet missed, to add a sense of center in Lansing. Old Town on Turner street and Cesar Chavez Avenue have attempted doing so, and we can already see the economic rewards, for people do crave a connection to the past, even in Lansing. Instead of depriving the city of it as an imposition coming from outside forces, let this magnificent building, all of it, and not just the façade, be put to use for the benefit of the mentally ill and homeless, as a goodwill gift from the University of Michigan Health System to the city of Lansing. Let the homeless and the mentally ill experience the inspiring beauty and craftsmanship of a more interconnected bygone era. More concrete, cold steel and thick, tinted glass will not do what this magnificent building could do for them and for us all.

The Eastern High School building was created in the 1920s at the time when the world-renowned Mexican Muralism artistic movement emerged in war-torn Mexico due to civil strife, and the inspiration created by Mexican muralists with their public art in public spaces, accessible to the marginalized of Mexico, made a huge difference in building a strong sense of national identity in that country. The movement provided aesthetic beauty and art for the underprivileged masses, moving them, healing them, uniting them, rebuilding Mexico’s sense of community. We in the United States experienced the benefit of Mexico’s wise decision in waves that inspired the creation of a government-sponsored program for the arts under the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal, helping the vulnerable, impoverished and unemployed masses during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The Detroit Institute of Arts, and even the lobby of the old MSU Auditorium on Farm Lane witness the benefits of that important social movement. Mexican Muralism not only helped give meaning to Mexico’s marginalized groups through therapeutic beauty and tranquility in the walls of magnificent buildings open to them, it united their whole nation. Even the ancient Greeks knew that when they built the Parthenon. Let Eastern High School be that opportunity and draw inspiration for community inspired murals along its extensive walls to create an aesthetic, and therefore therapeutic solution, helping the mentally ill and homeless while rebuilding identity in Lansing. Let me finish by underscoring that aesthetic beauty or lack thereof, identity and mental illness are all interconnected, and to not see that is definitely not a visionary approach to solving the mental health crisis in Lansing.