Phantom Moon over Lansing

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

Three weeks ago, in mid-October 2005, State Archivist of Michigan Mark Harvey placed a set of folded paper sheets on a table, drew a deep breath and gingerly picked up one corner.

The papers came into his hands when an East Lansing resident and former Lansing City Planning Office employee named Sue Cantlon came to his office at the State Archives in downtown Lansing that day. She told Harvey that a Lansing-area couple had picked the papers up at an estate sale, as part of a $25 lot of mold-fringed books, and passed them on to her.

Cantlon told Harvey in advance what the papers contained, but he still wasn’t prepared for what he saw. “It wasn’t until I unfolded them, laid them out and looked at them that I realized what was sitting on the table,” Harvey said. Spread before him were a set of seven blueprints, clearly etched in fine white lines on deep blue photo-sensitive dye, detailing every window, tower, cornice and fireplace of one of Lansing’s most fabled landmarks.

It was the residence of Ransom E. Olds at 720 S. Washington Ave., designed and built in 1902 by Lansing’s most significant architect, Darius B. Moon, and leveled in 1971 to make way for I-496 — the Ransom E. Olds Freeway.

A largely self-educated poet, artist and craftsman, Moon built over 260 structures, most of them in the Lansing area, during a busy career that lasted from 1860 to 1922. The overwhelming majority of these structures are no longer standing. Moon built mansions and stables, factories and barns, offices and theaters, but these prints, as far as Harvey is aware, are the only drawings by Moon still in existence.

“When I saw it, it was like a piece of Lansing’s history just came right back in the door,” Harvey said.

The Moon Olds plans found their way from a dusty stack of junk to the archives because a Lansing history enthusiast happened to be at the right place at the right time. Antonia Miernik, now living in Florida, is a former member of a Lansing historic preservation committee and a hard-core estate sale rummager.

In October 2002, Miernik and her husband, John, went to the estate sale of one Nicolette McElroy of 803 W. Shiawassee St. in Lansing.

“This woman and her husband were avid collectors,” Miernik said of McElroy. There were so many items in the Xanadu-like estate it took five separate auctions and two months to dispose of everything. Items worth tens of thousands of dollars, such as Tiffany lamps, were jumbled with stacks of unopened book-club cookbooks. To deal with this overload of items, auctioneers sold off books by the lot, without regard to contents. “I saw my husband, John, come over with an armload of moldy books, and I asked him if he was out of his mind,” Miernik said. He said, ‘you won’t believe what I’ve got — the plans to the Olds house.’ He actually knew what he was doing. The whole lot cost $25.”

When the Mierniks got the plans home, they decided not to keep them.

“They didn’t belong in our back bedroom closet,” Miernik said.

When the couple moved to Florida, Antonia called Cantlon, a friend, who is active in historic preservation in Lansing. “I trusted her to get them to where they needed to be,” Miernik said. “She called me two weeks ago and said this new archivist was thrilled to have them.”

It’s evident that Harvey is thrilled, even through his sober archivist’s beard and spectacles. “To have someone just wander in with something of this value and say, ‘Here, I think you should have these,’ and not try to sell them to you is pretty rare,” he said. “For better or for worse, the ‘Antiques Road Show’ has made people more aware of history and historical items.”

People are more on the alert for valuable items, says Harvey, but they’re also more savvy about value. “It’s a double-edged sword,” he says, “but I’ll take it, because even if people are just thinking of the value of it, at least they’re not going to discard it.”

The blueprints show that even when designing and building for his most famous client, Moon didn’t let go of the playful whimsy that often graced his work. His mastery of the gingerbread-castle Queen Anne style and the blockier Victorian Carpenter style are both in evidence in the Olds house.

Looking at the plans for the first time, Harvey marveled at the wealth of eloquent details. “I think he was just playing with it here,” he said, pointing to the weathervane on top of the house’s highest tower. There Moon perched a curved-dash Oldsmobile, the company’s earliest model, even though the decoration was never built.

The plans also reveal a large, two-story-high square of cement-floored space called the “automobile room.” “That’s got to be one of the first attached garages ever built,” Harvey said. Welcome to the 20th century.

“There are dimensions for everything, even the windows,” Harvey said. “You could rebuild the house from these plans — if you could afford it.”

Although the plans are in amazingly good shape considering their age, Harvey says they will be restored, encapsulated and imaged as soon as the archives’ budget permits. “Now they belong to the people of Michigan,” Harvey said. “In the short term, if people want to come in and look at them, it will be very controlled, because they are light-sensitive, and they are brittle,” he said. Still, if people want to see them now, Harvey won’t stand in their way. “The more and the sooner we get people thinking about historic structures in Lansing, the better.”

Jane Bryce is Darius Moon’s great-grandniece, descended from Darius’ oldest brother, Andrew. She lives in Delta Township with her husband, Terry. Both are family historians.

“I was never inside, but we went by it many times,” she said of the Olds house. “It was huge, awesome, up on the hill, and I would look at it and imagine what their lives were like.”

Born in 1841, Moon climbed to the top of Lansing’s architectural world from a humble farming background. His parents came to Michigan from New York in 1854 to establish a family farm in Delta Center, but Moon was not enamored of the life.

“One day my older brother and I were hoeing corn in a field by the side of a swamp,” Moon wrote in an autobiographical fragment. “I said to him, ‘Mart, I’m done. I won’t work another minute on this farm.’ I threw my hoe as far as I could into the swamp and said good-bye, I knew not where.”

Moon apprenticed with a local contractor, learning the building trade so well he became a contractor himself at 20.

He sunk his $300 earnings into a scholarship at H.P. Bartlet’s commercial college in downtown Lansing for 1871-72. (Even while staying in town, he had to punch through ice to get his water from a well, as the city of Lansing had no water yet.) In 1888 he gave up contracting for architecture, and in 1891 he built his family home at 116 S. Logan St. (moved to 216 Huron St. when Logan was widened in 1975). He retired at 72, having housed many luminaries of greater Lansing, including Edward W. Sparrow, Henry Kositchek, and J.W. Hagadorn in addition to Olds. Moon lived at the Logan house until his death in 1939.

“He was quite a character,” great-grand-niece Bryce said. “I know my aunt [Moon’s niece] corresponded with him and was quite taken with him.”

Among Bryce’s treasured possessions is a handwritten book of poems Moon put together, although the verses are unlikely to rival his architecture in the eyes of history. “Oddly enough, the one I remember the best is when he says that young ladies shouldn’t show their legs in public,” Bryce laughs.

For Harvey, the sudden apparition of the Moon Olds blueprints sadly underscores the need to care for historic buildings, especially in Lansing.

“Lansing really had quite a stock of historic homes that are gone,” Harvey said. “Part of that is natural attrition, but if you go to other towns — Kalamazoo has taken good care of its old housing stock. There should be a better avenue for historic districts. That’s the biggest impediment to preserving historic structures here.”

Jane Bryce shares Harvey’s view. “I look back at that period and we lost so many wonderful buildings,” she said.

“It’s too bad that communities don’t take a more active role in preservation,” added Antonia Miernik. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”