While much of downtown Kalamazoo has been preserved, dozens of its historic buildings have been demolished and replaced over the past half-century. Historians have preserved memories of those buildings through photographs. But one Western Michigan University Ph.D. student is remembering them in a different way – by recreating the old buildings with Legos.
When David Kohrman was a kid, he always looked forward to Sunday mornings. On that day, his Dad drove the family out of their suburban neighborhood and to the First Baptist Church, amongst the historic buildings of downtown Kalamazoo.
"And my big treat was every week, going downtown to go to church," he says. "And after church, I'd beg my dad to drive downtown a little bit so I could see all the buildings!"
Kohrman is a Ph.D. student at Western Michigan University. He’s pursuing a degree in history, and specifically, historic preservation. When you hear about those drives, the career path makes sense.
Kohrman has never liked the slap-it-together home style that became so popular in the American suburbs. But those nineteenth-century, castle-like behemoths downtown? He loved those.
"It was the big buildings. American National Bank. The Kalamazoo Building. I loved the late 19th, early 20th century stuff especially," he says. "I like the density. The details. And, you know, the age. Buildings get older, they develop character. They age like fine wines, I think."
Slowly, Kohrman’s love evolved into a kind of hobby. In middle school, he started collecting postcards displaying worn-down, decades-old photographs of buildings from Kalamazoo’s history. The old Kalamazoo County Courthouse. The Burdick Hotel. Many were demolished, but Kohrman loved to imagine how they looked in three dimensions.
Then, in college, Kohrman rediscovered the Lego sets from his childhood. He looked at them and thought, Wait, could I use these to rebuild the old Kalamazoo?
Seated on the Lego-covered floor of his house, Kohrmanpieces together his latest project: a full Lego reproduction of Western Michigan University’s East Hall.
Over the past 10 years, Kohrman has built and rebuilt more than a dozen of these kinds of old Kalamazoo buildings, using only Legos.
Many have disappeared from Kalamazoo’s downtown. But through pictures, memories, and thousands of bricks he finds online, Kohrman reconstructs them in miniature form.
"There's a number of ways I can do it," he explains. "A lot of it is through the mind. I'll experiment with new parts. I'll figure out, how do I do these buttresses, these windows, piece it together?"
Kohrman’s mini-Kalamazoo looks both familiar and mysterious. He walks over to his model of the old Burdick Hotel and talks about its history.
"Well, the Burdick was the Kalamazoo's leading hotel for the 19th and much of the 20th century. It stood where the Radisson hotel stands now," Kohrman explains. "It's why Radisson is there. This building was built in 1911 after the original Burdick burnt down. One of the biggest fires in Kalamazoo's history. And it was a really high rise building, stood there for 60 years."
But, Kohrman says, after the rise came the demise.
"But in the 1960s, a lot of these downtown hotels started to decline because the highway system, people aren't coming into town by the trains. They're coming by the highway, so they're staying at the Holiday Inn or something like that," he says.
"And eventually the Burdick closed in 1971. And they decide to tear it down. And not just the Burdick Hotel, they tore down the whole block to build the Kalamazoo Center, the Radisson. Which to me was one of the great tragedies...the demolition of the Burdick block was one of the great preservation tragedies in Kalamazoo’s history."
Kohrman is angry that these buildings were destroyed in the first place. He says Kalamazoo has been better than most at preserving historic buildings.
"But seeing what's been destroyed," he says. "Like, obviously, East Campus being the big local example. It's one of the worst things to happen to preservation in this city in a long time. Looking around Michigan, it blows my mind that they blew Tiger Stadium down the drain and built that new ballpark. All these great buildings that continue to be lost."
Kohrman remembers finding an aerial photograph of Kalamazoo from 1937. It put things in perspective.
"And in Photoshop, I kind of ghosted out the buildings that are no longer existing," Kohrman says. "And when I was all done, I went oh my god! I couldn't believe, it's literally like three-quarters of the downtown is gone from the time period."
"But I do kind of realize that I have kind of collected a series of ghosts," he says. "Another way to look at it is the buildings are gone but this is the way that I can experience buildings that I never got to see in real life or are lost, I can bring them back in a plastic form or know them that way."
Kohrman knows he probably won’t be in Kalamazoo forever. That’s why he wants to find a place for these buildings, somewhere. Maybe a temporary exhibit, for six months or a year. He’s not sure just yet. But he says it’s important, so the memories of Kalamazoo don’t fade away like its buildings have.
You can see some of Kohrman's work at the Western Michigan LEGO Users Group website.
