Flint: Solid as a rock
This Michigan city has had its problems, but the plucky town is bouncing back
FLINT, Mich. — The American crossroads of good nature and grand spunk can be found in Flint.
The Carriage Town Antique Center is the gateway into the gentrification of the battered Rust Belt city. The store originally was a 1928 Sears & Roebuck tire/service station. Within the center’s narrow aisles, I bought plastic coasters from a defunct Buick transmission plant and Carl Crow’s 1945 book The City of Flint Grows Up: The Success Story of an American Community.
STAYING THERE: The Flint Area Convention & Visitors Bureau put me up in the squeaky-clean Comfort Inn & Suites, I-75 at Holly Road in suburban Grand Blanc, 10 minutes south of Flint. Nightly rates range from $80-$130; (810) 694-0000, comfortinn.com.
BIKING THERE: It’s best to bring your own bike it you plan on cycling Flint’s ample trails.
Friends of the Flint River has bike rides at 2 p.m. Sunday through Oct. 25. Just show up at the trail across the street from the year-round Flint Farmers’ Market. For more information, call Jack Minore at (810) 235-1490.
G.M. TOUR: Check out a tour and slideshow of the last G.M. assembly plant in Genesee County at blogs.suntimes.com/hoekstra and suntimes.com/lifestyles.
Antique store owner Nick Hoffman was on hand. He introduced himself as a “Flintstone.”
There’s an emerging yabba-dabba-can-do spirit in Flint.
I bumped into Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, who was holding a meeting next to the antique center in Hoffman’s Deco Deli. Walling, 35, had never held public office before being elected mayor a month ago. He’s a 1992 graduate of Flint Central High School. I wear boxer shorts from 1992.
“Flint is evolving into a diverse 21st century economy,” he said while clutching a cup of coffee. “We’ve got some of the cheapest land in the country and some of the best infrastructure.”
I met Rebecca Fedewa, 36, and Nathan Murphy, 38. In 2002, they bought a 1914 two-story house in Carriage Town. Fedewa is executive director of the Flint River Watershed Coalition. They moved to Carriage Town because Fedewa wanted to walk two blocks to her downtown office. Murphy carpools an hour to Lansing, where he works in environmental policy.
Carriage Town is one of Flint’s oldest neighborhoods. The name comes from the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, once the world’s largest maker of horse-drawn carriages. Co-founder Billy Durant formed the General Motors corporation here in 1908.
About 800 people now live along Carriage Town’s tree-lined streets, including the residents of 500 beds in five homeless shelters. Boarded up buildings can still be found in between the restored mansions from the late 1800s.
“In the seven years we’ve been here, crime is down and home ownership is up,” Fedewa said.
Erin Caudell, 31, lives in a two-story Victorian next to Fedewa and Murphy. Caudell, who promotes urban agriculture and green space with the Flint-based Ruth Mott Foundation, watched me eat a sloppy Coney Island ($1.95) with local Koegel’s meat at Angelo’s Original Coney Island at Davidson Road and Franklin Avenue. Angelo’s is famous for its hamburger-based chili sauce.
“We have one of the most extensive park systems in America for a city of our size [110,000 people],” Caudell said. And all of those trees are gearing up to show off their fall colors.
“Color is superb along the Flint River,” she said. “We’ve had enough rain so this fall there should be beautiful color. We have lots of maples, oak and linden trees which give you a lot of yellow.”
Caudell is from Burton, a suburb of Flint. Her mother is a Flint school teacher. Ironically, her father was recently laid off from Electronic Data Systems, which researches the auto industry.
The new wave knows of the old stereotypes.
Everyone I spoke with in Flint bristled at the mention of Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger & Me,” which turns 20 this year. The satirical film details the late G.M. CEO Roger Smith’s closing of several auto plants in Flint. The scene of a Flint woman plugging “Bunnies as Pets or Rabbits as Meat” remains a stirring image.
Fedewa said, “We were vacationing in Hawaii and Nathan wore a T-shirt that said ‘I Heart Flint.’ People actually pointed and laughed. People feel sorry for us but we don’t need that. We’re doing OK.”
When I told my friends I was spending a couple of days in Flint, I was met with uniform skepticism. But I will return. That’s not to say Flint has solved its problems. The school system is a mess. Unemployment is at 28.6 percent. Locals complain about crime, although I’m sure I was as safe in Flint as I am around my Humboldt Park neighborhood.
It’s hard to find a place to stay in Flint. Although activity is re-emerging downtown, you won’t find any hotels here.
With all of its old, stately homes, Carriage Town is ripe for a bed and breakfast. Maybe I will move to Flint and open my own. I will call it “Bed Rock” in honor of the Flintstonians.
There is a Holiday Inn Express across the street from the year-round Flint Farmers’ Market. If you stay there this month, you may run into actors Brian Dennehy and former presidential candidate Fred Thompson. They’re filming “Alleged,” an original screenplay about the Scopes Monkey Trial, which took place in rural Tennessee. The studio has an office near the Farmers’ Market and filming will take place at historic Crossroads Village and Huckleberry Railroad, just north of Flint.
Speaking of railroads, Flint is the hometown of one-note 1970s rockers Grand Funk Railroad. The band was named for the Grand Trunk Western Railroad line that runs through the town. (Good photo op on 12th Street at the Fenton Road viaduct where someone tagged Grand Trunk with Grand “Funk.”)
This is the season to fall into Flint. You can bike or hike along the 12-mile round-trip Flint River Trail that runs along the river corridor from downtown Flint to Blue Bell Beach, or see the autumn colors from a canoe or kayak on the Flint River.
Green space still has room to grow in Flint.
“The Flint River Corridor Alliance is a group of downtown stakeholders who are interested in using the river as a focus point for redevelopment,” Fedewa said.
To spark development throughout the city, Mayor Walling said he’s trying to attract new businesses by getting rid of outdated ordinances and streamlining the permit process, among other things.
“We’ve been our own worst enemy,” said Walling, who also owns 21st Century Performance, a Flint-based consulting company.
Hoffman, 55, opened his antique store and deli a year ago. He has more than 2 million items within his restored, Art Deco antique center, and more antiques fill his 18-room Carriage Town home.
Looking over a book of vintage Flint postcards Hoffman said, “It took us a long time to bottom out as a city. I’ve lived in this neighborhood 27 years. It was terrible. My son used to jump over the crackheads laying on the street.”
Hoffman’s antique center sits across from what once was the Berridge Hotel, a 100-unit flophouse that rented space to ex-cons for $20 a night. The hotel closed in 2006 and the Berridge reopened as loft apartments in late 2008. It has 17 apartments and is 100 percent full.
“Downtown, the neighborhoods, Atwood Stadium all have been restored,” Hoffman said.
The 11,000-seat Atwood Stadium was built in 1929 along the banks of the Flint River. It’s now part of the Flint Riverwalk. Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad performed there last month. It’s also home of the Flint Fury of the semi-pro Mid-Continental Football League. Several area high school football teams play there.
“I have the city in front of me and a neighborhood behind me,” Hoffman said. “It’s a nice ethnic mix, although we don’t have a lot of Hispanics.”
“This is the neon district,” Hoffman added. “Flint was at its [most] robust when neon came in during the 1930s. Because of the General Motors paychecks, everybody put neon on their buildings.
“People here got paid weekly [from G.M.] and that’s what set them apart. They could buy things which drew on the demands for goods and services. We had the best architects. We had the best builders. We had the best furniture stores. People eyeball us because we changed the world with what we’ve done here.”
Seasons change. Flint is falling into its second act.