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Welcome Message from the President
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The J.C. Penney Building
The Cooley Law School library, begun so inauspiciously in the basement of the old Masonic Temple was bursting at its seams by the mid 1980’s. Through a generous $100,000 gift from the Gannet Foundation brokered by Professor Bob Fisher, we were able to expand the library to include most of the first floor as well.
The expansion involved creating a separate staircase connecting the two floors within the library space. We also installed a dumbwaiter to move books between the basement and the first floor.
Still, the facility was unsatisfactory. It was crowded, of course. The home made tables were sturdy enough, but they were hardly state of the art. And the place was noisy. The entire library staff was stationed just a few feet from the study area, and the bustle of catalogers, reference clerks, and counter personnel mingled with the comings and goings of the students to mount a continuing buzz in the main reading room.
We knew we needed more space. We didn’t have to be told by the American Bar Association, though of course, they told us, and told us.
I was always on the alert for opportunities to acquire real estate in downtown Lansing. One property that intrigued me was the old J. C. Penney store on the northwest corner of South Washington Square and Kalamazoo Street. The building had been vacated by the owners some years before. Like so many properties in the center of American cities, it just sat there, a mute reminder that the suburban mall had stolen the hearts and pocketbooks of the buying public.
The building had been acquired by the Granger Construction Company. I negotiated a purchase price of $700,000. We would employ Granger to do renovation work. At this point, however, there was no plan for remodeling. And there was no money. We paid the purchase price in cash, and agreed to pay Granger on a piece work basis as work progressed.
Granger put a plywood construction fence around the building and removed the inoperative escalator between the first and second floors. Then we ran out of money, as the law school recession of the ‘80’s took hold.
For the next several years, the Penney’s Building was an albatross around my neck. It became a source of gossip among the local bar. Indeed, I recall receiving a letter from an attorney whose office faced the building across Washington Square. When was that eyesore going to be finished? Even the shoemaker on the Northeast corner added his two cents to the criticism when I went to get my shoes repaired.
At one point, during a faculty meeting at which budgetary constraints were being discussed, Bob Fisher suggested that the Penney’s building could be sold to finance the faculty tuition remission benefit. I didn’t receive that idea very warmly. To me, it was like burning the furniture to take the chill off of the house.
At the annual meeting of the Cooley board of directors in May of 1988, then chairman of the faculty conference, Professor Elliot Glicksman, made an impassioned plea for the board to drop plans to use the Penney’s building as the law library. In doing so, he was speaking for the majority of the faculty. He argued that the convenience of being able to consult library resources between classes was critical. Students and faculty, he insisted would not go out in the rain or brave winter snows to use the library.
To counter his argument, I obtained a map of the Michigan State University campus. Then I had a map of downtown Lansing made to the same scale. By laying the Lansing map over the MSU campus, I was able to demonstrate that the Penney’s building was substantially closer to our classroom building that the Michigan State library was to most of the university’s classrooms and offices.
As the decade of the 1980’s came to a close, I was grateful for the increase of faculty governance in at least one particular. The process of planning and consultation, committee meetings and solicitation of input from all interested stakeholders stretched out the time needed for drawing and approving the final architectural plans for the new library until, in the early nineties, our revenue stream had improved to permit construction to resume.
The rule in those early days was simple. The board of directors generally approved any construction project we could pay for out of surplus earnings. We had long since negotiated a termination of our contract with Granger. They were not about to wait four or five years for the job. So when there was enough money in the bank, I cut Ray Brennan lose to begin the construction of the library.
We did it with typical aplomb. I called the media and announced that there would be a window breaking ceremony; our version of the classic ground breaking. On the appointed day, with appropriate flourish, I threw a sledge hammer through one of the plate glass windows in the front of the old J. C. Penney’s building.
It made one heck of a bang. I always wanted to do that.
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This Page was last updated on:
09/22/2006