Ken Palmer

Lansing State Journal

LANSING – One of downtown Lansing’s iconic buildings is up for sale.

Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School has put the former Masonic Temple on south Capitol Avenue on the market with an asking price of $8.15 million, said Don LeDuc, president and dean of the law school.

Cooley has owned the seven-story structure since 1974, but LeDuc said the addition of classrooms to the nearby Cooley Center several years ago and the more recent declines in the Cooley’s enrollment have left the school with little need for the older building.

“If we were at the level we were at a few years ago, we might need the backup,” LeDuc said. “I don’t see we would ever get back to the level.”

In 2006, Cooley had more than 2,900 students at its Lansing campus alone. Last year, it had fewer than 1,800 spread across five campuses. It was once the largest law school in the country. Last year, it slipped behind Georgetown.

The 105,000-square-foot Greek revival-style Temple building was completed in 1924. It served as a main gathering spot in downtown Lansing for decades.

LeDuc recalled going there for lunch in 1966, when he worked as an intern in the state Attorney General’s Office. There was a cafeteria on the first floor.

“Rumor has it they served 2,000 meals a day,” he said.

Cooley actually kept the cafeteria open for a few years after it moved in, but eventually expanded its library into that space, LeDuc said.

The law school did extensive renovations. The four ceremonial Temple rooms were converted into classrooms and named after the Inns of the Court in London. The sixth-floor auditorium, two-stories tall with a balcony, hosted high school proms during the early years along with graduation ceremonies and other events.

Some sections were renovated several times over the years, but the building remains in good condition, school officials said.

“It’s been around a long time,” Mike Gibson, the law school’s facilities director, “It’s got good bones and it has a lot of years left on it.”

After the law school opened the library on Washington Avenue in the early 1990s and the Cooley Center on Capitol Avenue in 2000, it gradually moved operations out of the Temple building.

The last classes were held there in 2008, LeDuc said. The operations department moved out last fall, and the building is now largely vacant.

“When you think back, probably close to half of our graduates had no connection to that building other than an occasional class,” LeDuc said. “The early half of our students, that’s the school to them.”

There is, he said, “a certain sentimentality” to letting it go.

Cooley has made a practice of renovating downtown buildings. Its library on Washington Avenue was once a J.C. Penney store. The Cooley Center on Capitol Avenue was once the Commerce Center Building.

“One of the things we have tried to do in Lansing is recycle and bring back to life old buildings,” LeDuc said on Monday, as he stood in the Temple building’s sixth-floor auditorium.

Hopefully, he said, “somebody else will figure out a way to bring this one back to life again — hopefully for 20 years, or at least 10 years, to get it to the 100-year mark.”

State Journal editor Matthew Miller contributed to this report.