This past Friday and Saturday, a theater festival that had spent years running in Old Town set up shop south of downtown, in REO Town. Seventeen shows. An alleyway here, a balcony there, a print shop that normally runs job orders instead of puppet shows. The festival didn't move because REO Town suddenly got interesting. It moved because Old Town, for the first time since this thing started, didn't have anywhere left to put it.
That's the story worth sitting with if you live in REO Town or spend your Fridays there. Not "look, a festival happened here," but why it happened here, and what that says about which Lansing neighborhood still has slack in its building stock.
A Festival That Used to Belong to Old Town
The event traces back to 2005, when the directors of Peppermint Creek Theatre, including Chad Swan-Badgero, started what became the Renegade Theatre Festival, a chance for local companies to stage work that would never fit a normal season in spaces that were never built to be theaters. Over the years it drifted from East Lansing into Old Town, where it eventually settled, before COVID interrupted everything and the founders shelved it in 2022.
This year it came back under a new name, the Renegade Fringe Festival, with a new focus and, according to WKAR's reporting, a new set of neighborhoods. Many of the festival's old Old Town locations were no longer available, so organizers looked south.
Why REO Town Had Room When Old Town Didn't
Festival organizer Hecksel described the appeal to WKAR in terms that double as a pretty good description of REO Town's current building stock:
"Art sprouting up wherever you can put it."
That's not incidental to the neighborhood. REO Town has spent the last several years accumulating exactly the kind of oddly shaped, recently vacated, or half-finished commercial space that a fringe festival needs and a finished, foot-traffic-heavy district like Old Town has less of.
Over the two days, Lansing City Pulse reported that performances landed at:
- The Robin Theatre, the neighborhood's 60-seat listening room
- REO Town Clubhouse, where the Habibi Dancers performed upstairs on Friday at 7 p.m.
- ALT Printing, an actual working print shop repurposed for the weekend
- REO Town Marketplace, the multi-tenant building that also houses a record store and several small retailers
Friday's lineup alone ran seven pieces deep: the serio-comedy "Funk & Wagnalls," the audio theater piece "All Hail to Love," dramatic works "Raqs Sharqui," "The Attic Play," and "Outside," plus two community improv showcases from Bare Bones Improv. Saturday shifted toward staged readings, open-mic poetry, and puppet shows running from early afternoon into the evening. Most of it was free.
You don't get that kind of sprawl across four unrelated buildings unless those buildings are sitting a little empty, a little flexible, and a little cheap to book for a weekend. Old Town has spent years filling in that kind of space with permanent tenants. REO Town, for now, still has it to give away.
The Same Pattern Shows Up in the Restaurant Rotation
If a two-day arts festival feels like a one-off, look at what's happened to the neighborhood's restaurant footprint over the past two years, because it's the same mechanism at a slower speed.
REO Town Clubhouse opened inside the nearly 12,000-square-foot building that had been Ellison Brewery and Event Space until it closed in December 2023. The new owners kept the bones and rebuilt the inside around an art deco, Prohibition-era theme, with a 90-seat dining room, a 72-seat pool hall built around eight tables, and a 200-guest event space for dueling pianos and live jazz. A large, half-empty building that closed one year became a full-service Italian restaurant and entertainment venue the next.
Go two blocks over and you'll see the mirror image. Good Truckin' Diner had been a REO Town fixture for years, but its building only ran about 850 square feet, too small for the crowds it was pulling. In December 2024 the diner announced it was moving to the larger former Creole Southern Kitchen & Burger Bar space in Old Town, which had closed in September 2024. The plan for the original, undersized REO Town building wasn't to sit vacant. It was to become a bakery, keeping the diner's roots in the neighborhood even as its main dining room moved north.
Neither of those moves made the local news because REO Town is "hot" right now in some abstract sense. They happened because the neighborhood has a supply of buildings that don't quite fit their current use, and a rotating cast of restaurateurs, brewers, and now theater directors willing to take the mismatch and make it work for a season, a year, or a weekend.
What's Still Running When the Festival Isn't
None of this depends on a festival showing up to be interesting. The Robin Theatre, at 1105 South Washington Avenue, has been running its own calendar since it was founded in 2015, with regular Poetry Room open mics and a recurring chamber music series from the Lansing Symphony Orchestra held in a room that seats 60. Because the block is designated a social district, patrons can bring drinks in from Sleepwalker next door, though the Robin itself doesn't serve food.
A few doors down, REACH Studio Art Center has offered free and low-cost art classes to Lansing youth since 2004, and Wheel House Studios has run wheel-throwing classes for adults since it opened in September 2018. Around the corner, a mural by Sydney G. James, Eufoe, Birdcap, and Spiz covers the parking lot beside Riv Church and its event space, the Cadillac Room, at 1115 South Washington Avenue.
None of that needed a fringe festival to exist. It's the baseline the festival got layered on top of, which is a better sign for the neighborhood than the festival alone would be. A weekend event can happen anywhere with cheap rent. A neighborhood that also supports a nonprofit art center, a working listening room, and a mural big enough to fill a parking lot has something more durable going on underneath.
An Old Habit, Not a New One
There's a reason the recycling of half-used buildings feels native to this particular stretch of Washington Avenue. REO Town takes its name from Ransom Eli Olds, the founder of both Oldsmobile and the REO brand, and it's where the REO Motor Car Company began building automobiles in 1904 or 1905. The neighborhood's entire founding purpose was figuring out what to build next inside buildings that had just been repurposed for something else. A century later, the same instinct is still running, just with dueling pianos and puppet shows instead of assembly lines.
That's the actual takeaway for anyone who lives here. REO Town isn't competing with Old Town by trying to look more finished. It's winning a different kind of attention precisely because it isn't finished yet, and that's a strange thing to be grateful for in a neighborhood, but it's real. The buildings that sat empty long enough to annoy a passerby are the same ones that gave a 20-year-old festival somewhere to land this year.
If you're already living with that texture day to day, keep an eye on the Robin's calendar through the rest of August. If REO Town's mix of raw space and steady reinvestment has you thinking about what a home or a small commercial property here could be worth, or what it takes to buy into a neighborhood that's still actively being rewritten, Benjamin DeRosa Realty Team knows this stretch of Lansing block by block. Schedule Your Free Home Consultation and let's talk about what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what the listings say.
