New threat to Glaister House: Lansing City Rescue Mission

The City Rescue Mission of Lansing is the new steward of a historic property — which it is contemplating tearing down.

The Glaister House, a 148-year-old red brick Queen Anne- and Italianate-style residence at the corner of Walnut and Kalamazoo streets in downtown Lansing, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2017. The rescue mission took possession of it last year in a non-cash transaction with its previous owner, Set Seg Insurance Services Agency Inc. The rescue mission purchased the insurance company’s adjacent property in 2023 and is renovating its two buidings into a facility to provide food and shelter for up to 300 single adults.

A rescue mission spokesperson declined comment on plans for the Glaister House.

City spokesperson Scott Bean said the rescue mission has not sought a demolition permit. However, a well-placed source said the mission has made “informal inquiries” about one. Bean said granting demolition will depend on the rescue mission’s intended use. However, he added, “Historical significance of the structure is not a criteria of review.”

The Historic Society of Greater Lansing included the Richard and Deborah Glaister House when it compiled a top-10 list of endangered sites in 2022. Set Seg had purchased it in 2018. Up till then, it was occupied.

Almost immediately, rumors spread that the insurance company planned to tear it down for parking. However, Lansing Mayor Andy Schor interceded, telling Set Seg executives he would oppose another surface parking lot in downtown Lansing. Set Seg left it standing but unoccupied.

The Glaister House was built in 1876 by master stonecutter Richard Glaister, who worked on the state Capitol. The exterior is modest, but it’s a large house, with 14 rooms, and the marks of a master builder are everywhere.

The National Register of Historic Places lists dozens of period details, from the oculus window in the front gable to carved plant motifs inspired by designer Christopher Dresser. “Despite long years as an apartment building the house retains much if not most of its original finishes,” the listing observes. The Italianate style is relatively rare in Lansing.

Born in England, Glaister moved to Detroit in 1868 and was hired to do stonework for the Michigan State Capitol after working on Pittsburgh’s Trinity Cathedral, a Gothic symphony in sandstone with a 200-foot spire. 

The Glaister family lived in the Lansing house until Richard’s death in 1887. The grandparents of the house’s final occupant, Alice Sessions, bought it in 1912 and turned it into a boarding house. Its spacious layout and close proximity to the Capitol kept it full for decades. Lansing mayor Ralph Crego lived in Apt. 3 as a newlywed.

Alice Sessions lived in the house, on and off, from age 15 until shortly before her death April 15, 2018. Her parents acquired the house in 1966, when it was auctioned for back taxes.

Sessions, the house’s most passionate and tenacious advocate, was a member of the first graduating class at Sexton High School, in 1943. In a 2018 City Pulse interview, she recalled visiting her mother at the Glaister House at age 15, sleeping in the basement and roller-skating to Arbaugh’s Department Store. After moving around the country more than 40 times to follow her husband, Homer, to various job assignments, she spent her final years back in Lansing, happily stretching out in spacious Apt. 1, with a view of the Capitol dome through the bay window.

“Finally, home!” she said in a 2018 interview. “I’m living high on the hog. It’s the first time I’ve ever gotten an apartment so big.”

In the late 1970s, five nearby homes, mostly unoccupied and deteriorating, were razed, leaving the Glaister House alone in a sea of parking lots and office blocks.

But Sessions kept the house in trim, turned down multiple offers to buy the house and rented upstairs bedrooms to boarders as recently as 2017. She invested $30,000 into repairs, installed a new roof and kept the house painted a cheerful red. She planted a riotous mob of irises in front of the house. The welcoming, ornate brick house and its wild spray of irises delighted passing motorists cruising the sea of asphalt and concrete.

When she aged into her 90s, Sessions took steps to ensure that the house she loved would be saved after her death.

In fall 2017, she knocked on the door of Dale Schrader, a member of Preservation Lansing who has rehabbed several Lansing homes, asking for help drafting a letter nominating the house as a local historic district.

“I went through it with her personally on three or four trips to her house,” Schrader said. “She was so proud of that house, and she wanted to save it.”

Sessions sent the letter to Schor in January 2018, but her son, Richard Sessions, asked the mayor to withdraw the request, because the house was in trust, with Richard as co-trustee. Putting the house in a historic district, Richard wrote in the letter, “could limit our flexibility to sell this asset to meet my mother’s living and health care needs.”

When Sessions called Schrader to ask about the status of the request in early 2018, he told her what happened.

“That was the last time I talked to her,” Schrader said. Alice Sessions died in April 2018, mooting the reasons cited by Richard in the letter, but the request to put the house into a historic district was never reinstated.

“We came so close,” Schrader said. “It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever experienced in my preservation career.”

In June 2018, the Glaister House was sold to Set Seg, who headquarters was around the corner on Kalamazoo.

Schrader said there was “some damage” to the house, including water damage from a radiator leak.

“These things can be fixed,” he said. “I’m a builder and I’ve rehabbed houses that were in much worse condition.”

(Leo V. Kaplan contributed to this story.)