Your inside scoop on everything Lansing
Across Lansing's older neighborhoods, a quiet but ambitious movement is underway. Everyday homeowners armed with YouTube tutorials, secondhand tools, and serious grit are transforming neglected properties into something worth bragging about. We went inside the walls — literally — to find out what's driving this DIY renovation wave.
Lansing has a habit of hiding its best stuff. Between the well-worn tourist trail and the places that only show up in group chats and word-of-mouth recommendations, there's a whole other city worth discovering. Here's your insider cheat sheet to the corners of Lansing that locals secretly hope you won't find out about.
You've probably seen their work without knowing their names. A mural on a retaining wall that made you slow your car down. A sculpture outside a coffee shop that stopped you mid-step. Lansing's creative underground is more alive than most people realize, and it's being shaped by a handful of artists who are putting in serious work — mostly without the spotlight. We went looking for them.
Not long ago, Old Town was easy to overlook — a stretch of aging brick buildings and quiet streets that most Lansing residents drove past without a second thought. Today, it's the neighborhood people are actually choosing for date nights, gallery hops, and weekend hangs. So what exactly happened here, and who made it happen?
Skip the Yelp rabbit hole and trust us on this one — East Lansing is quietly home to some seriously underrated dining spots that the regulars have been hoarding for years. From steaming bowls of hand-pulled noodles to a sandwich counter that's basically a neighborhood institution, these five places are worth every bit of the hunt. We talked to the owners, sampled the goods, and came back with receipts.
The pandemic didn't just close Lansing's venues — it threatened to silence an entire community of musicians, promoters, and music lovers who had spent years building something real. Two years after the worst of it, local artists and club owners are telling us what it actually took to rebuild, what they lost along the way, and why the scene that's emerging feels different — and maybe stronger — than before.