Eye Candy of the Year: Rotary Park

Lansing has a lot of parks, but the city’s newest gem is not a green, tree-filled oasis, like the others. Rotary Park, the new urban hangout on the Grand River just north of the Lansing Center, may be small, but it was a smash hit when it opened in late summer, and it may be a game-changer for the city.

At the heart of the park is a stepped-up concrete embankment, smack at river’s edge, where people can sit and contemplate the water. There are plentiful tables, chairs, benches, a fireplace and a “forest of lights” greeting strollers at the park’s north end.

Social media posts made fun of the park’s sand “beach,” with no place to actually swim, as the city’s biggest cat litter box, but so what? Kids love to bulldoze and romp in the sand, and grownups love to lounge on lawn chairs and watch the sun set over the grand Ottawa Power Station. The crowds strolling through the park in the brief few weeks of warm weather after it opened was exactly the mix its designers envisioned: MSU students, curious Lansingites from all sides of town, international visitors and locals from low-income downtown apartments who welcomed a new place to bring their kids. Many ventured downtown for the first time in years.

The Capital Region Community Foundation, the lead donor and prime mover of the privately funded, $1.8 million project, enlisted top urban planning experts to make the most of a small but crucial patch of urban riverfront. Leveraging existing assets was key. The park wraps neatly around the 20-foot-tall, $225,000 sculpture “Inspiration,” a gift for the city’s 2011 sesquicentennial. The riverfront was a compromise location for the sculpture, and the graceful steel loop looked a bit lost in the floodplain, but Rotary Park’s design gives it new pride of place while absorbing it into the surrounding play scape. The play of light on the sculpture, from the nearby “Forest of Lights” and from the city itself, gives it a striking night presence. The park also makes a nice hub for the newly repaved and extended Lansing River Trail system, a close runner-up for 2019 Eye Candy of the Year.