The Brenke Fish Ladder is a working sculpture you can stand inside

Most fish ladders are plain concrete chutes built to do one job. The one on the Grand River in Lansing’s Old Town is different: it’s also a piece of art, signed by a sculptor, with its own name on the books at the Smithsonian.

The William A. Brenke River Sculpture-Fish Ladder went in around 1980 and 1981 beside the old North Lansing Dam. The artist was Joseph Kinnebrew, working with landscape architect Robert O’Boyle, and the idea was to solve a real problem with something worth looking at. A dam blocks fish trying to swim upstream to spawn. A ladder gives them a way around it — a series of stepped pools, each one a short hop above the last, so a fish can climb the river the way you’d climb a staircase one shallow step at a time.

What Kinnebrew built is a fan of curving concrete walls and walkways that channel the water into a low, roaring set of rapids. You can walk right out over it on the built-in paths and stand close enough to feel the spray. In the right weeks, when the run is on, you can watch fish gather in the churn below and work their way up through the openings.

It sits on the Lansing River Trail, the paved path that follows the Grand and Red Cedar rivers for miles through town, so plenty of people roll past it on bikes without realizing the gray sculpture they’re crossing is doing honest work underneath them. It moves water, it moves fish, and it’s been quietly doing both since Carter was president — which is more than most public art can claim.