Vanishing City or Phoenix from the Ashes?

Flint Series, Chapter 6

William Sundwick

Gordon Young published Tear-Down in 2013. It’s his memoir of returning to Flint as an adult after presumably leaving the city forever to pursue a journalism career in San Francisco. It was written before the Flint Water Crisis (2014 - to date).

Young describes the Civic Park neighborhood of his youth, his strong family ties and social engagement shared by most in the city during the seventies and eighties.  He knew about the massive depression enveloping the city after the departure of General Motors; the unemployment, the crime, and, most of all, the collapse of real estate values! That’s what motivated him to buy a reno house for $3000, close to his old neighborhood, abandoned and in need of major repairs (stripped of its copper plumbing, among other things).

Through the course of working on his house, he met many of the figures who might begin to make Flint a real city again. He was impressed by what he encountered. But, in the end, he gave up and returned to San Francisco. It was “too heavy a lift,” he decided. The resources required for scaling his efforts up to make a significant dent in the blight were too great. Hence, his subtitle: “Memoir of a Vanishing City.”

Yet, even with the Water Crisis seemingly adding another nail in Flint’s coffin, a little bit of online research (and my own 2014 visit to Flint) points in a more positive direction. It may not be cause for unbridled optimism, but the replacement of pipes and mains throughout the city is still scheduled to be completed sometime in 2019, and the water source has been switched back to safer “Detroit water.” There are still nearly 8000 GM jobs in Flint (a far cry from the 80,000 jobs of forty years ago, but still). And, some downtown renovation is apparent, a thriving farmers’ market, and a vibrant arts scene encouraged by local community organizations. The Flint Cultural Center is still a going concern sixty years after its founding with C.S. Mott Foundation largesse.

As the population of the city declined, and private or charter schools arrived, Flint Community Schools dwindled as an institution. This makes me sad, but it should not be considered an unmitigated negative. Even in my day, some of Flint’s brightest lights were products of the strong parochial schools in the city (see: Michael Moore’s memoir, Here Comes Trouble, 2011). In the mid-sixties, there were four public high schools in the city, now there is only one – Southwestern Academy (formerly Southwestern High School).

The brain drain experienced in Flint over four-plus decades is no different from that of any other rust belt city in decline. Job markets control demographics for the better educated even more than for the unskilled, who often don’t have the means to leave. Additionally, “white flight” to suburban locations was no less a factor in Flint than many other cities in mid-century America.

Yes, it’s largely about racism. Flint did have one of the first open housing ordinances in the country (1967), and one of the first African-American mayors (Floyd J. McCree, 1966). During this period new GM plants were built in the suburbs – before closing completely! Genesee County’s population didn’t decline nearly as much as the city over that forty-year devolution of Flint.

In June 2014, I returned to Flint for a Sundwick cousins’ reunion (no aunts or uncles left by then, except one in Traverse City, who couldn’t travel). The Flint water supply had already been diverted to the Flint River by then, but none of us knew it. We didn’t drink city water, anyway. My cousin Carol, who hosted the reunion, lived in suburban Grand Blanc. Cousin John was kind enough to take me on a tour of the city, such as it was by that time. We saw downtown, we saw Civic Park, we saw the East Village and Cultural Center, we saw Carriage Town, the birthplace of General Motors more than a century earlier.

And, we saw the house on Winona Street  where I grew up. It was clearly occupied, as were most in the Ballenger Highway neighborhood. In fact, if anything, the neighborhood was more attractive than I remembered it from the sixties – the trees were more mature, offering plenty of shade on that summer day. Houses were generally well-maintained, with fresh paint, landscaping, mowed lawns. But, nevertheless, when I suggested getting out of the car and walking, John was quick to say, “I don’t think that’s a great idea.” Why? It was the middle of the day on a Sunday, seemed peaceful enough, although I don’t recall seeing anybody on the sidewalks. I believe John’s fears were based on us being white! That hadn’t even occurred to me at the time. It seems so bizarre to me, having lived in the cosmopolitan, diverse world of Northern Virginia more than half my life now.

But, John had different experiences. They were, unfortunately, more akin to my father’s fears of 1965 when Dad declared, “We have to move outside the city. You know they’re almost to Welch Boulevard!?”  No need to explain who “they” were. My parents sold the house, for about the same price they had paid 12 years earlier, then moved to Flushing as soon as I graduated from high school. They didn’t even wait to find another house – we lived in a rental apartment for a few months, before they moved into a new townhouse development (back in the city, but behind a wall and gate!). Their paranoia about crime and property values was the final straw for me. I went off to college in Kalamazoo that fall, cured of any desire to return to such unpleasant dynamics.

<![endif]-->The city did experience a long, slow decline. But, somehow, through it all, there has consistently been a core of community activists and concerned citizens who have insisted on making lemonade from lemons. The Flint Public Art Project (FPAP) has been sending volunteers to turn abandoned houses into works of art. A developer has converted the historic Durant Hotel in Downtown to loft apartments. The rococo Capitol Theatre downtown has been renovated and reopened. Farmers’ Market reopened in 2014 and has become a community gathering place in the center of Downtown. University of Michigan-Flint has an active Resource Planning and Social Work department where students have been imagining Flint futures, especially for the Civic Park neighborhood. Public organizations have raised funds to renovate and rehabilitate some grand old Victorian homes in Carriage Town. Kettering University, at the base of the Carriage Town neighborhood, is a respected engineering school, formerly known as General Motors Institute.

The indoor

It would be unrealistic to expect any future population growth for Flint. The industrial framework that supported tens of thousands of unskilled workers will never return. But, perhaps there is an even more noble future for this city – one that grows organically from deeper roots in that former logging transit across fords on the Flint River.

Some will stay. They will provide a different kind of growth for Flint. It will be growth in spirit and heart. The factories are gone, but they were the transient parts of my Flint experience, anyway. Something else is still there. It is Flint’s soul.

Arrival and Insertion, 1953-62

The Flint Series, Chapter 3

William Sundwick

Flint grew rapidly in the early fifties. The 1950 Census pegged its population at about 163-thousand, but by 1960 it was 197-thousand. We all noticed it.

New neighborhoods, like our Ballenger Highway neighborhood, were adding single family houses, in ours mostly “ranch-style” (often called “ramblers” on the East Coast), at such a rate that services couldn’t keep up.

Schools needed to be expanded quickly. Since the nearest elementary school to us was over a mile away (no buses), four hastily erected prefab “primary units” for grades K-3 served as a stopgap.  These one room units, identical except for paint color, were in use until we moved out in 1965, when the new Anderson Elementary School finally opened in the neighborhood.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary/Junior High School had been built on Chevrolet Avenue in 1928, only a few blocks north of the old “Chevy in the Hole” complex. This was the original dedicated Chevrolet and Buick assembly location, built in the teens. From 4^th grade on, I was deemed capable of walking safely the short mile from my house to the school.

It was a pleasant enough walk, except in winter when Flint became frozen tundra for four months.  I seldom had to walk alone, always accompanied by chums in my grade. It was a friendly neighborhood, with many kids my age.

We strolled down Winona Street four blocks to Mackin Road, then east on Mackin another five blocks. It was a big school compared to those one-room prefab primary units. There was a spacious playground, a gym, and a library.

My friends included Abe, who lived on Mackin Road – I stopped at his house each morning to pick him up, and we walked together. He was the elder son of Holocaust survivors who had somehow found themselves in Flint, moving from New York (Brooklyn?) a couple years earlier.

There was also Charles. He walked from his house on Begole Street a block away, and we would proceed from there. Some tensions arose later with Charles, as our world views took on shades of plant management. His dad was my father’s subordinate at Ternstedt.

My cousin John Sundwick, the youngest of my Uncle Bob’s three kids, was a year behind me in school, and lived only about four blocks away on Lavender Street; but, alas, our Elementary School paths never crossed, since school districts in Flint placed the boundary between Civic Park Elementary and Longfellow between us. Ballenger Highway was an insurmountable barrier to walking without crossing guards or lights, for kids our age. In Junior High, defined as grades 7-9, the “other Flint Sundwicks” lived in Florida, returning later to the Flint area.

In those frigid winter months, or on any rainy days, I remember rides proffered only by my own mother. Other moms didn’t seem to step up. Did they not have access to a car? In Flint? That’s possible, since there might not have been many two-car families in our predominantly working-class neighborhoods. Mom’s 1953 Chevy did yeoman’s service for seven years.

Michael Moore, in his memoir about growing up in Flint, “Here Comes Trouble” (2011), declared mid-century industrial Flint a relatively classless society. He wrote of living on the same block with doctors and lawyers, even though his own father was an hourly-rate assembly line worker at AC Spark Plug .  The same was true in my Ballenger Highway neighborhood – indeed, except for my own closest friends, I had no idea what people’s dads (and moms) did for a living. It was never a topic of conversation. And, even somebody as class-conscious as my mother, who put much effort into “social climbing” (allegedly for my dad’s career), would never say an unkind word about any of our neighbors, their income, education, or social status.

I learned later, in high school, that the Ternstedt people, except my friend Charles’ family, were ensconced in wealthier neighborhoods in town.

As the sixties arrived, our neighborhood was completed. The newest houses were somewhat larger and fancier than the originals like ours. Split levels appeared in the late fifties. And we learned that some people moving into them were part of a “professional” class, self-employed (especially doctors, tax accountants, funeral directors) – not necessarily reliant on General Motors for employment.

This change may have separated our neighborhood from the adjoining old Civic Park neighborhood, which was expressly built by GM for its workers in the teens and twenties. Despite the abandoned houses, vacant lots, and ghostly shell of an empty Haskell Community Center, a historical marker at Bassett Park, its former centerpiece, still stands to recognize this. Civic Park epitomizes the “old” Flint better than any other neighborhoods on the west side of town. It may symbolize the death of the city as well.

 I always noticed what kind of cars were in my neighbors’ driveways. Back then, people changed cars frequently, typically every two years. They all had a sense of loyalty to Mother GM, apparently reasoning they could secure their own paychecks by buying its cars. Almost always Buicks and Chevrolets, the specific model, equipment, etc. waxed large in my observation. But we were the only folks in the neighborhood with a new Cadillac every year, from 1954-1958, until Dad’s career flatlined after his first coronary. We immediately switched to Chevy.

We did have two cars still, and a garage for them. Did the neighbors talk, when my dad courageously switched to the lowest-priced “stripped down” Chevy in 1958? My mom was embarrassed, and she told us as much! I had grown fond of the Cadillacs, too, but looking back I now understand my dad’s rather powerful social statement. Why did we care, really, about the Caddies? Did it matter what the neighbors thought?

My world changed when I entered Flint Central High School for the 1962-63 school year. It was the Harvard of Flint public high schools, the oldest (1923), situated near the Flint College and Cultural Center. And, all I had to do to get there was live in its district, which included a narrow swath on the west side of town (perhaps drawn for racial gerrymandering or integration?). It also included the “East Village” neighborhood – home to Flint’s old money, and intellectual elite.

It was a new world, indeed. Eventually, it led to a strong desire to escape! 

Disaster Strikes: The Beecher Tornado, 1953

We Move to Flint in Its Wake

The Flint Series, Chapter 2

William Sundwick

F5 tornadoes are rare in Michigan. The most destructive category of storm on the Fujita Scale hit Flint in 1953, one of the ten worst on record in the U.S. There was no warning system in those days. On June 8, at about 8:30 P.M., the killer storm descended on a densely populated community on the north edge of town, Beecher Township. It was part of a violent freak weather pattern that had been ravaging a big swath of Michigan and Northwest Ohio, extending even into New England. But nowhere that summer was there as destructive a storm as in Flint. There were 116 fatalities, over 800 injured; 340 homes were flattened. Fatalities and property damage from a single tornado would be exceeded only in 2011, in Joplin, Missouri.

The whole city was placed in a state of emergency. The storm was a character-builder, much as the 1936-37 Sit Down Strikes were in this UAW town. People remember it. Survivors tell their children and grandchildren about it. Flint received an “All American City Award” for its disaster response.

The storm’s path extended along Coldwater Road, from Clio Road in the West to Dort Highway in the East – nearly the full length of that major Northside thoroughfare. Beecher High School was in its path, its gym destroyed. And, in addition to nearly 500 homes, the brand new, not yet operational, Ternstedt GM Plant was also in the path. Miraculously, the new plant, built to replace the original Detroit Ternstedt Division plant, destroyed by fire, was not heavily damaged and its opening delayed by only a few weeks. A. W. Sundwick moved his family (wife and one six-year-old boy) from Dearborn, and began work in Ternstedt’s process engineering department, as planned, by July.

Our house was not in the storm’s path. We were about to move into our new construction “ranch type” house in the developing Ballenger Highway neighborhood, perhaps four miles further south,  and west.

It would be years before the Beecher community could rebuild. But fortunately for the rest of Flint, rapid growth was widespread. Postwar prosperity for General Motors meant prosperity for Flint. To the historic original Buick, Fisher Body, Chevrolet, and AC Spark Plug facilities, which collectively employed tens of thousands of mostly unskilled hourly workers, now were added more Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants on the west side of town. And, on Coldwater Road, the Ternstedt plant.

Ternstedt had split from Fisher Body in 1948, as strategic GM product planning focused more on chrome hardware. Electroplating that chrome was the name of the game at Ternstedt. The Electroplaters’ Society quarterly journals on our living room end table were serious professional reading for my father, who became head of process engineering in Flint, and an engineering consultant for the Division (there were other Ternstedt plants in Ohio, New Jersey, and Syracuse). He would sometimes travel to the other plants – typically flying from Flint’s Bishop Airport. My mother kept reminding me that Dad had a very “responsible” position, and that’s why he was often gone.

She said that’s why he often showed signs of stress in his dealings both with her and me. The rest of the family blamed his 1956 heart attack on that stress (although we later learned that he had a congenital heart valve defect which just caught up with him at age 49). He survived that first heart attack, and a second one ten years later. But the first one flat-lined his career, the second one forced him into medical disability retirement, and Mom and Dad left Flint for sunny Florida – never to return to Flint, me neither.

Many in Flint did not fare as well as us. Still, thanks to the Sit Down Strikes in the thirties, the UAW had been recognized and thousands of workers, most with families to support, were generally able to sustain a secure middle-class existence through the fifties, sixties and seventies. But, each in our own ways, we all dealt with the stress of something ominous hanging over the city, something beyond our control, with no real warning system in place -- much like that ugly green-yellow-black cloud that moved over Beecher Township in June,1953.