A new DTN building called 300 Grand, which offers retail and living space, has opened at the corner of Grand River Avenue and Delta Street. The building features a unique concrete mural by artist and owner of Lansing’s La Fille Gallery, Tiffany Klein.
The building’s residents moved into the 6,500 square-foot building on Aug. 26, vice president of DTN Management Colin Cronin said. Currently 79 people call the building home.
But work on the structure is not finished.
Construction crews are still wrapping up exterior work. The sides of the buildings will be finished up during the next two to three weeks, Cronin said. The contractors are also finishing sidewalk work and additional accessible street parking.
The mural will be completed sometime during the next month, Klein said.
She described the 40-foot-by-20-foot piece as “abstract and loose.”
Klein said she intends to make the piece look as though a pushpin is holding the shapes together in a link.
The piece has already been carved out and will soon be colored, she said. The painting phase will take approximately one week, but designing the piece took much longer.
“I started doing the design when the prints were brought up for the 300 (Grand) building,” she said. “I finally decided, kind of at the last minute, that it should be something more artistic, more creative, more like something you haven’t seen before — almost questioning what it is.”
Klein wanted to work on the piece because of its medium and nature of the piece.
“I can do anything I want, and it’s not going anywhere because it’s concrete,” Klein said.
This piece will have a longer shelf life than a traditional mural, which can be easily painted over.
“I knew it was going to be something that was going to be there even after I was gone,” she said.
This piece is being done as part of a city ordinance on large building developments.
“It’s what we call our ‘percent for art ordinance,’” Tim Dempsey, director of planning, building and development for East Lansing, said. "It’s an ordinance that City Council had adopted that specifies development projects that are over $500,000 put 1 percent of project costs towards public works of art, but that 1 percent value cannot exceed $25,000," Dempsey said.
Money can be put toward an art project being developed by the entity building the project from, which the 1 percent amount is drawn, or money can be given directly to another public artwork being built for the city.
The building and its artwork, which will overlook the East Lansing Farmer’s Market and Valley Court Park, is good for the city — mostly because this development sits on previously uninhabited land, Dempsey said.
“First and foremost, it completes and promotes development that was originally proposed by the city back in 2004,’” he said. "Now the city has a four-story building that occupies a previously empty lot," Dempsey said.
Both the idea for the project and its construction have been a long time coming.
“We broke ground and actually started digging a hole about September, October timeframe,” Cronin said. “But even as of April 1, we were only two stories of apartments above a steel deck.”
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Construction picked up during the summer.
“From April 1 until August 26, construction was absolutely flying on that property,” Cronin said. “It was a very tight and aggressive schedule, but we were able to hit it.”
Each two bedroom, two bathroom apartment has large windows, while the corner of the building features rounded, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Grand River Avenue.
This makes the apartments feel more spacious, Cronin said
The building doesn’t cater to one single pool of tenants, Cronin said. Residents are a mix of urban professionals and students. The mixed age environment is a deliberate move by DTN.
“To be able to get a good mix of residents is the best way in mind to live,” he said. "Students can begin integrating into older society, while adding a touch of youthful exuberance to the building’s milieu," Cronin said.
Cronin said is most looking forward to the building’s future progress. Cronin said he hopes tenants are a mix of students, families and faculty and staff who want to live close to campus.
Though he said it’s not at the core of the city, he thinks the building is a good addition to downtown.
“To me it is a cool, eclectic, very contemporary, modern building and the outside, with a four-story piece of art that’s in the court, and the Farmer’s Market there every Sunday — I think it’s a really neat kind of community,” he said. “It’s a neat blend of urban cool.”
