The East Lansing Public Library is located on Abbott Road within a residential neighborhood in central East Lansing, north of the Michigan State University campus. The main parking lot, located in front of the building is accessed from Library Lane, a small side street. Similar to Marcel Breuer’s Grosse Pointe Library, built ten years earlier, the library is raised on a platform several feet above the adjacent parking area, and a long brick retaining wall with a concrete cap divides the site in half. Mature trees create a shade garden along the front of the building where several pieces of sculpture have been installed. Unlike the Grosse Pointe Library, however, the building’s main entrance is clearly defined. The two-story, limestone-clad entry bay is recessed beneath the dramatic saw-tooth, metal-panel roof that extends back over the reading room. Clerestory windows beneath the roof admit natural light into the building interior and give the impression that the roof is floating. A patterned metal screen hung from the underside of the roof, between two brick wing walls, shields the two-story aluminum window wall from direct sunlight. Originally symmetrical in plan, the building was extended to the north and east as part of a 1970s expansion. The addition has a flat roof and is clad with pale yellow brick to match the original.
In 1961, after an opinion poll was distributed by the Library Committee of the East Lansing Community Council and members of the library friends group participated in a last-minute media blitz, the citizens of East Lansing voted in favor of a bond issue to raise funds for a new library. That same year, the Lansing Board of Education deeded property for the library to the City of East Lansing. The wooded lot that was to be the site of the new library was previously part of the the D. Robert Burcham property and a popular place for local children to play.
The local architectural firm of Manson, Jackson and Kane was selected to design the new twelve thousand square foot facility. The program for the new building was developed by comparing libraries in other similarly sized communities and called for the facility to be able to accommodate forty thousand volumes and provide seating for 120 users. The new library also provided space for community meetings and a room in which to hold a children’s story hour. The new library was dedicated on April 21, 1963. A mural in the building’s foyer was painted by Dirk Gringhuis, a local East Lansing artist and illustrator who received training at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and who wrote and illustrated a number of books, many of them on Michigan history.
By the mid-1970s, expansion of the library was necessary to meet the growing needs of the community. Between 1963 and 1976 the library experienced a dramatic increase in the number of volumes housed and circulated as well as an increase in basic services. Manson, Jackson and Kane, the firm that designed the original structure was selected to design the addition. The program required that the existing facility double in size to accommodate an increase in the number of volumes to one hundred thousand.
