Server Britney, left, tends to customers at The Firm Food & Spirits in downtown Lansing. The bar is one of the growing places in the city for students to go.
While most MSU students could pick out Lansing using their hand as a map, recent city officials have recognized that the spot on their palm hasn’t been a lifeline.
“A lot of students don’t even consider Lansing to be a destination – it’s dead to them,” said Jamie Schriner-Hooper, executive director of the Old Town Commercial Association in Lansing.
“The city has been virtually invisible in terms of its relationship with the university in recent years,” said Robert Trezise, president of the Lansing Economic Development Corporation.
While Lansing may be “dead” and “invisible,” to some, Schriner-Hooper said Lansing is slowly reappearing and resuscitating itself with festive dance clubs and bars, trendy outdoor dining and street entertainment, and cheap, new lofts downtown.
“Before, Lansing was General Motors Corp., and state employees,” Schriner-Hooper said. “After 5 o’clock, it was a ghost town. It takes the one person to stay open a little bit later, another bar to open and there’s a night life.”
Karrah Cullers, a theater junior, fell in love with Lansing and moved near a friend’s apartment in July.
Lansing’s recently revitalized night life was part of her decision to call the city her new home.
“A lot of the clubs I prefer to go to are a lot closer to where I am now,” said Cullers, who named The Cadillac Club, 621 Club and The Exchange of Lansing as frequent night stops she made in the city when she lived in East Lansing.
The Entertainment Express trolleys, connecting night spots in Lansing and East Lansing, has made it easier to travel to clubs and bars in Lansing since it was introduced just more than a year ago, said Pat Gilbert director of marketing for Capital Area Transportation Authority, or CATA.
“The whole idea behind the Entertainment Express bus was to create a unique novelty that would be more festive and more fun,” Gilbert said.
Before MSU students finished spring semester, about 1,000 riders were using the bus each month, she said.
Landing Lansing jobs
Getting the college crowd into the city goes beyond students opening their wallets for martinis, Trezise said.
Several programs within a campaign called “Linking Lansing & U” looks to help students land jobs in the city after graduation.
A job shadowing day in March brought 130 students to meet and network with 35 Lansing businesses. A yearlong entrepreneurship program will partner students with successful entrepreneurs in the city. Both programs use MySpace.com and Facebook.com to keep students in touch with job possibilities in Lansing.
“We want students to live here, play here and create business here,” Trezise said. “That’s the only way we as a city can sustain ourselves going into the 21st century economy.”
Trezise said the prevailing opinion is that Lansing has struggled economically with the rest of the state but that isn’t the case by some estimations. The city was the only metropolitan area in the state to experience a net job growth increase last year, he said.
“Our downtown is experiencing a rebirth that nobody living here has seen in 40 years,” he said.
To keep the city continuing in the right direction, MSU must play a role, he said.
“One of the major universities in the world is at our doorstep. Not a lot of cities can offer that,” he said. “What we need to do is look in the mirror and be concerned with what we do now. We have to harness MSU for the resource that it is.”
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Calling the capitol home
Quieter, more affordable living drew Andrew Hare, a jazz studies senior, to stay in Lansing for three years.
The city also is home to Cooley Law School where Hare’s wife, Lindsy, is a student.
“We wanted to get away from the dorm room-type living where you don’t have a lot of space and it gets rowdy outside at night,” Hare said.
While the couple wanted to escape the noise, most of the people living in their neighborhood off of Saginaw Street are young students.
“It’s quiet, but it’s not dead,” he said. “We love it because everything is centralized. School, just for me, is really the farthest either of us have to go for anything.”
Schriner-Hooper said a new development across from a popular spot among students also may bring more students to the city.
Although it’s been a gradual process, community leaders believe Lansing is on its way to getting the attention it deserves.
“It will never be an overnight change, but I think if we continue to do these things, slowly we’ll begin to attract more students,” Schriner-Hooper said.
