A building to house LCC's outreach program for four-year degrees will replace it.

Chris Strugar-Fritsch, director of facilities operations at LCC, says many of Old Central’s historical features will be rescued. Decorative window sills, a patch of interior brick wall, fancy cornices with dental toothing, and quoins (exterior wall corners dressed up with decorative offset bricks) will be sawed off the building and saved and incorporated into a commemorative sculpture planned for the site. Until the demolition begins, these features can still be seen in vivo on the northwest corner of the building, the only century-old walls still exposed to the outside world.{quote_top}

When Lansing High School was built in 1875, the city’s school board wanted to make a grand statement, hiring architects Israel Gillett (who designed the first Capitol building in 1847) and Elijah Myers (who designed the present Capitol in 1878).

The huge building was an elaborate model of Victorian “second empire” style — and nothing but trouble from the start. It was hard to ventilate and difficult to light; moreover, the roof leaked. Additions and corrections made in 1910 and 1918 added $75,000 to the school’s original cost of $50,000, nearly bankrupting the city’s young school system. (The entire budget for the Lansing School system in 1880 was $15,000.)

It took until 1905 to pay off the original bonds for the “Big Red Schoolhouse,” as it was then called, with total interest costing the city another $80,000.

A series of name changes reflected the building’s shifting roles. When Eastern High School was built in 1928, Lansing High became known as Central High School. In 1942, another high school, Sexton, was built, and Central became Technical High School, specializing in industrial and vocational classes.

When the Lansing Board of Education established LCC in 1957, the school’s first classes were held at Old Central, as the building became known. The first group to meet was a refresher math class with 32 students.
Strugar-Fritsch, who now holds the keys to every room of this musty labyrinth, is among those with Old Central memories.

“The first day of class I had as an apprentice was in this building,” he says.

As Strugar-Fritsch ducks into the building’s high-ceilinged basement, a tangled matrix of pipes, ducts and wires ranging in size from kitten’s wrist to sewer main criss-cross over his head. “This is what we deal with every day,” he says. “These systems have been superimposed over one another over the years.”

On the first floor, window wells a foot and a half deep betray the thickness of Old Central’s walls, built to hold up wedding-cake towers that no longer exist. Throughout the building, hallways and classrooms are encased in dozens of varieties of drop ceilings, masonry, dry wall, carpeting, and miscellaneous accretions from every decade of the 20th century.

Although many departments and personnel have already left the building, the decommissioning process officially begins May 13, when recyclables are stripped and utilities are turned off.

“A lot of people’s lives have come through here,” Strugar-Fritsch says, turning off a light and closing a door to a storage room. The room’s wooden, curved floor, once part of a gymnasium running track, echoes with 131 laps of history.