When old Eastern High School’s iconic cupola was torn to pieces Thursday despite assurances from University of Michigan Health-Sparrow that it would be saved, a sense of urgency reverberated through Lansing.
That prompted Dominic Cochran, founding director of the under-construction Ovation Center for Music and Arts to make a last-ditch effort to save the Art Deco chandeliers in the Jon Young Auditorium.
“After the cupola thing happened, there was a renewed urgency,” Cochran said. “So, I reached out to UM Health and the mayor, saying, ‘Hey, can we just pause for a couple of days to get in there, since the cupola is gone?’”
But it was too late. The historic west wing had already come down, rendering the attached auditorium unstable. Mayor Andy Schor secured UM-Sparrow’s agreement to hold off on demolishing the auditorium. But is fate was in the hands of E.T. MacKenzie Co., which is carrying out the demolition, and Ed MacKenzie told Schor no.
It was a fitting if sad end to efforts to preserve as much as possible of old Eastern, which UM-Sparrow acquired in taking over Sparrow Health System in 2023.
Ray Ellison, who has done salvage work on local historic buildings since the 1960s, said crushing the chandeliers was “a sin,” but that such liability concerns have been prevalent for decades — the chandeliers needed to be salvaged before demolition began.
So why did everyone wait?
A lack of foresight, cooperation and political will spelled the demise of old Eastern High School. Clearly, meaningful community preservation efforts should have started long before UM-Sparrow announced its plans to demolish the school and build a mental health facility on its grounds. Preservation activists were disappointed in their hope that UM-Sparrow would maintain hometown Sparrow’s more cooperative relationship with the community.
Local politicians, meanwhile, struggled to have a meaningful dialogue with the unexpectedly monolithic entity.
“If we could go back in time over the last 20 years, there is much that I wish could have happened differently regarding old Eastern HS,” Mayor Andy Schor wrote in a text message last week.
As the dust settles over the rubble that was once Eastern High School — over the shattered remnants of the cupola, chandeliers and murals — community advocates are looking for lessons in what they see as a colossal failure of historic preservation.
The first? Preservation efforts should begin long before an imminent threat of demolition.
A failure in foresight
On Friday, Robert Perro, Eastern class of 2013, watched the excavators tear into his high school auditorium.
“It caught everyone by surprise,” he said. “They just showed up one day and started tearing it down.”
Perro said he thought preservation efforts might have been more successful if they had started before UM-Sparrow announced the demolition plans.
“I mean, we did have roughly 10 years to try to save it, and we did kind of wait until the last minute,” Perro said. “We should have tried harder back then.”
Bill Castanier, president of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, said no one had expected the pre-acquisition Sparrow to demolish old Eastern.
“It came as a complete surprise to the community” when UM-Sparrow announced the plan last year, Castanier said. The news was paired with an announcement that UM-Sparrow wants to build a $97 million psychiatric facility on the 18 acres that were part of old Eastern’s campus along Pennsylvania Avenue adjacent to the healthcare complex on Lansing’s east side.
While Eastern was on a 2022 list of at-risk historical structures penned by Castanier and Preservation Lansing founder Dale Schrader, Castanier did not think the risk was so immediate.
“We were less concerned about Eastern because there was no discussion of tearing it down or anything like that,” he said. “We never thought it would be torn down, but then UM bought Sparrow and then they just made the announcement.”
Former Mayor Virgil Bernero was in office when the Lansing School District sold old Eastern to Sparrow. He thinks things would have gone differently if Sparrow had not been acquired.
“There was a tacit understanding that Sparrow would do everything in its power to preserve the beautiful, historically significant Eastern High School building when Sparrow acquired the building from the school district,” reads a Monday statement from Bernero. “All that went by the wayside it seems after the acquisition by U of M.”
“It’s a damn shame.”
Lansing City Council President Ryan Kost, who represents the east side, said the demolition showed that unwritten intentions were insufficient.
“I think one of the biggest lessons is that, when the school board bought this building, and there was nothing in the contract to preserve anything, it should have been considered by the Historic District commission,” Kost said. The sales contract included a clause requiring Sparrow to respect Eastern’s history, but it was considered too weak to prevent the landmark 97-year-old school’s demolition.
Mayor Schor said that “hindsight is 20/20.”
He said that over the last two decades, effort should have been put into “finding time for people to get into the building, evaluate what is in it and what could be saved, and saving those things.”
Castanier said the last-minute preservation effort felt “like we were tomb raiders.”
“There should have been a plan and strategy before they started ripping into it all,” he said.
He said getting the word out in the community had been surprisingly difficult, because “there was always this feeling that they’d save the west wing.”
“We were fighting this monolith, but we couldn’t get the attention of the community until they took the excavators and started tearing it down,” he said.
A collapse of cooperation
A glass sky bridge spanning Michigan Avenue between the Sparrow Hospital and Sparrow Professional Building is a testament to the old Sparrow’s legacy of community collaboration.
When Sparrow announced the professional building, the Eastside Neighborhood Organization opposed the sky bridge because it would block the iconic Capitol view. Sparrow built the bridge out of glass instead to avoid impeding the view.
Similar compromises accompanied other major Sparrow expansions, according to eastsider Jennifer Grau, who delivered a presentation on the topic to the International Listening Association and later recorded it for Sparrow’s archives.
Joan Nelson, the former executive director of the Allen Neighborhood Center, has worked with Sparrow officials for decades and was involved in initial talks about Eastern’s future before the acquisition. She said UM-Sparrow is not the Sparrow she remembers collaborating with.
“The Sparrow of old was embedded in this community and almost every expansion project of the last three decades involved serious, respectful negotiation and dialogue with community stakeholders,” Nelson said.
“UM Health is clearly not invested in maintaining that collaborative culture. Their indifference and hubris have been stunning during the last nine months.”
Sparrow spokesperson John Foren declined to comment Monday for this story.
Perro said he believed UM-Sparrow could have done more.
“I just feel like they could have done more to bridge the gap between the preservation groups, the alumni and themselves, and try to see what could be saved,” Perro said as the auditorium fell. “If they didn’t want to save the building, or they couldn’t, then at least try to save some of those artifacts.”
“Look at that mural,” he said, pointing at an exposed mural in the auditorium. “That really couldn’t be saved?”
Kost said UM-Sparrow was unwilling to negotiate with the city. Kost helped organized the ad hoc Coalition to Preserve Historic Eastern and Promote Mental Health.
“We could never get them to sit down and have an adult conversation,” he said. “To listen to us say, ‘Hey, you have this giant parking lot, we know you’re going to build in the back of it, and developers have expressed interest in taking the building and doing what they did with Walter French, which was a building past the point of no return.’”
Rather than collaborate, Kost said UM-Sparrow strategically misrepresented preservation advocates from the onset.
“Controlling the narrative is more powerful than you think, and having enough money to be able to control the narrative changes everything,” he said.
“In retrospect, I think people still thought that the coalition wanted to put a mental health facility within Eastern High School,” even though “everyone agreed that it wasn’t suited for a mental health facility that was state-of-the-art,” he continued.
Castanier thinks community members had false hope of collaboration because they were expecting UM-Sparrow to have a similar place in the community as the old Sparrow.
“There were a number of people who had dealt with Sparrow before, and they continued to be very optimistic because they had a relationship with Sparrow,” he said. “I don’t think anyone could have understood how massive of a difference UM buying it made. There was no understanding of UM and how they do business in their hospital sector.”
“It’s run like a corporation. They don’t care what the community thinks.”
Castanier lost hope after he spoke at a meeting of the UM Board of Regents, which will decide whether to approve plans for a mental health facility on old Eastern’s grounds. He said the regents showed no interest in cooperation or compromise, and that the organization was run like a monolith.
“I don’t think people understand what the University of Michigan hospital system is,” he said. “It’s a corporation, it’s a real estate organization. Try to pinpoint who makes decisions in that organization. On paper, it’s the regents, but I went to a regents meeting, and all they do is gavel things. There’s no discussion.”
“Even mail we sent to them got returned,” Castanier said. “We sent a letter to the university president, and we got a return to sender.”
Kost compared UM-Sparrow to a bad neighbor.
“I certainly hope they’re a better neighbor than they have been, because right now they’re like that neighbor that you end up calling the cops on because their music is too loud and they throw stuff in your yard,” he said. “They don’t care about you.”
UM-Sparrow’s position is that the proposed facility has received “tremendous support from the community,” and that there is “nothing more sacred to us than protecting the health of our friends and neighbors throughout the community.”
UM-Sparrow repeatedly said it had worked with alumni to distribute artifacts, but Jim Lynch, Eastern’s alumni association president, told City Pulse repeatedly that he had been offered nothing.
Vivian Rodriguez, who watched the auditorium’s demolition begin Friday, said the most frustrating part of watching the school collapse was that no one she knew had received any response from UM-Sparrow.
“We’ve asked for certain items, and there’s no communication,” she said. “I think it’s that lack of communication that’s leading the whole community.”
Lynch declined to comment for this story, saying he was too upset following Eastern’s demolition.
Pressure and politics
While some public figures were sad to see Eastern go, they failed to put up a hard front against the demolition.
When Sparrow bought the building, the city lost its say on what was done with it. A short-lived effort to study declaring the building a historic district would have delayed demolition at least until a decision had been made, but pressure from local unions and UM-Sparrow itself stopped the effort’s momentum shortly after it began. Faced with such pressure, the City Council went from supporting a resolution to save Eastern to declining even to study making it a historic district, despite Kost’s efforts.
With the historic district study dead in the water and the contract having no provisions against total demolition, there were no legal grounds upon which to stop the demolition. But some have criticized elected city and state legislative officials for not listening to constituents’ concerns and pushing harder against the demolition.
“I was terribly disappointed in our elected officials,” Castanier said, stressing that their role was to listen to constituents’ concerns. “They may not want it, but at least stand up for it.”
“The previous mayor met with the historical society about buildings, he came to our meetings, he even tried to get us interested in a couple buildings,” Castanier said, referring to Bernero. “He just had an open mind about it. He wasn’t terribly excited about art and history, but he had an open mind.”
Schor stressed on multiple occasions that he wanted parts of Eastern preserved. However, he welcomed UM’s expansion plans with open arms, even adding “Go Blue!” in a statement last June. Only after subsequently being pressed about old Eastern’s fate did the Mayor’s Office offer its hope for preservation.
Council member Peter Spadafore, who was president of the school board that approved Eastern’s sale to Sparrow, supported the demolition in 2024, arguing that preserving the building would halt development of the mental health facility. The fear of lost union jobs if UM chose to build the facility elsewhere motivated six representatives from area unions to oppose the planned historic district study in August.
Spadafore declined to comment for this article.
Kost and Nelson disputed the assertion that a delay was necessary in an August op-ed in the Lansing State Journal, arguing that there was ample space to build the facility already and the build and demolition sites did not overlap.
But even Kost discouraged the continued pursuit of a historic district study in August after UM discontinued communications, saying at the time that “to continue down this path, it’s going to further antagonize them into making sure nothing is left.”
Asked if he stood by that statement, Kost said that he “had hoped it would be a good will effort to get U of M to come back to the table.”
“They chose not to. It was disappointing.”
Aftermath
Vivian Rodriguez, Eastern class of 2001, is starting a counseling group to grieve the loss of the building. The mental health counselor said she had multiple community members reach out independently for counseling services during the demolition.
“It’s not just the students,” she said. “It’s everyone, the alumni, the staff, who are disappointed.”
Castanier said he hoped the grief reverberating through the community will be a flashpoint that helps restore a passion for preservation in Lansing, something he said is missing.
“Maybe Eastern will be the tipping point,” he said. “That’s all I can hope.”
Two weeks ago, as Eastern fell, Kost submitted a list of nine buildings to the Historic District Commission to consider sending to the City Council for studies. He said that was “just a start.”
Ellison said younger people in Lansing were becoming more interested in historic preservation, and that Eastern’s demolition had brought people together.
“I think younger people are getting more into it, and have a will to do it,” he said.
“But once the buildings are gone, you can’t get them back.”
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