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.

Wasteland vs. Intellectual Ferment

Or, My Parents’ World vs. My World, High School Years

Flint Series, Chapter 4

William Sundwick

Flint Central High School was a new adventure. High school then comprised three years: grades ten, eleven, and twelve.

That meant one of my early high school experiences, in Spring 1963, was taking “Drivers’ Ed,”  which included behind-the-wheel time at a fancy new road course built on the grounds of Flint’s newest high school, Southwestern. Not satisfied with classroom content and a driver’s test at the local DMV, ours included “real” driving experience on streets with stop signs, traffic lights, and opposing traffic. And, the kicker, it was at the wheel of a choice of brand-new donated Buicks! Yes, this was Flint. Like everything in the city, if GM could figure out a way to encourage future customers, they would do it, including a high school drivers’ education program.

When I was fifteen, that was exciting.

The Resistance

However, I was now embedded with peers who were not so excited about cars and the auto industry. Their parents did not work for the “chrome colossus” of General Motors. They saw themselves as independent of the Flint mainstream; indeed, above it.

Dan, Nathan, Abe and his younger brother Sol (“Manny”), were all children of Holocaust survivors who somehow managed, separately, to find their way to Flint after spending early childhood in New York or Uruguay (in Nate’s case). They were all products of a strong Yiddish/Polish family culture. How did they come to live in Flint, these guys the same age as me?

I was a privileged transplant from Dearborn, whose paternal family were Scandinavians drifting down from the Upper Peninsula, and maternal family solid midwestern Scotch-Irish. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist preacher.

But my crowd was not my dad’s or Uncle Bob’s kind of people. None of my circle were cogs in GM’s wheel! Charles, my Ternstedt friend from earlier days, faded away after elementary school, perhaps due to his family being TOO close to my father’s work life (involving his dad’s performance evaluations from my dad?).

This group had parents who were shopkeepers, house-painters, and CPAs. But everybody in Flint was in some way beholden to General Motors, even if they did not work for “the man.” Success of their businesses indirectly depend upon him. When Flint’s population reached 200,000  in the sixties, that was about as big as a “company town” could get.

While in high school I was unaware of the glorious history of the sit-down strikes in the thirties, or the ultimate surrender of the UAW to corporatism in those post-war boom years. But, I was aware, even in my junior high years, of the acrid smell of stale cigarette smoke and half-emptied Manhattans in the living room on weekend mornings, left from the previous night’s corporate (Ternstedt plant, anyway) bridge parties. I thought to myself, “is this what I want to do for entertainment when I grow up?”

As my cultural affiliations solidified, the answer became clear -- no! And, it’s not because bridge isn’t a fascinating card game. But, I perceived a rot in the social fabric of those gatherings. It seemed a wasteland to me.

My friends had one thing in common. They were all uncommonly smart. Why they deigned to hang with me is still baffling, but I was flattered. We developed an understanding. None of us would come back to Flint once we escaped.

If anticipation of refugee status may have been natural for the Holocaust Children, it was not for me. They were well equipped for scraping by in jobs beneath their station – as their immigrant parents had done. I was too privileged to contemplate making huge sacrifices; instead, I hoped for lucky breaks.

The Academy

In addition to my social circle, there was also something about Flint Central’s location which had an important influence on my intellectual development. It would later be called the “East Village,” home not only to my high school, but the Flint College and Cultural Center. During my time at Central (1962-65), it included the shiny, modern steel and glass public library, a planetarium, art institute, concert hall, and the Flint Community College campus (now Mott College). Adjoining the East Village was the University of Michigan-Flint campus. The entire Cultural Center was developed primarily via the philanthropy of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. C.S. Mott, himself, also lived in his wooded estate, Applewood, adjoining the Center. Mott had been a co-founder of General Motors, and his foundation was primarily dedicated to improving the hometown of the corporation that created his wealth. It’s called “giving back.”

The land for the Cultural Center came from Applewood. But, Mott wasn’t the only notable who maintained a domicile in the East Village. Professors, including the first Dean of UM-Flint, lived there. I once went out with his daughter, my chemistry lab partner on that afternoon in November 1963 when the P.A. announcement told us that President Kennedy had been shot!

In fact, much of Flint’s “old money” lived in the neighborhood. I remember meeting a friend of a friend at his home there -- it had a butler’s pantry and dumbwaiter. He didn’t go to Flint Central, but to Georgetown Prep in Maryland!

So, there were the New York Jews, all of them left-wing intellectuals, the College and Cultural Center and East Village neighborhoods, and the C. S. Mott Foundation’s beneficence, all contributing to my evolving state of mind in high school. What else led to this ferment? 

The Actors

My mother. She was very proud of her hard-earned college degree from UM-Flint, after part-time studies as an adult, and a mom! She confidently marched into her high school English classroom in Flushing, a Flint suburb. At first, she felt she was reaching many of her students.

But, after a few years (by the time I was in high school), she had decided to call it quits. Her main complaint was the principal. She felt stifled by him, and generally devalued -- apparently a common experience for many teachers.

But, she did successfully tutor my cousin Bob (John’s older brother) in English when he returned to Flint from Tampa. He had a rough time in English. But, after her coaching, he was able to get into college, and from there to graduate school, and ultimately a professorship back in Florida.

Dad was there as well, but somehow didn’t contribute the same burning intellectual desire as Mom. He was an engineer, I would choose a different path.

Among my own teachers at Flint Central, four stand out: John Greenleaf Howe, Dale Kildee, Gayle Heyn, and James Graham Provan. Each played a significant role in shaping my future.

John G. Howe was my 10^th grade social studies teacher. Instead of world history, the traditional grade ten social studies curriculum, Flint called it “foreign relations” (probably to appease the local John Birch Society chapter – with their anti-communist agenda). He was a self-styled Republican politico, impressing me with the hard-nosed “realpolitik” behind his course’s topic.

He sponsored an after-school club, called the Reliques Society, which met in students’ homes, including mine. My socially conscious mom was slightly suspicious of the exact nature of this apparent “secret society” – but, she finally decided if it was endorsed by the Flint Community Schools, it must be okay.

Dale Kildee taught Latin. He also emphasized the political process, especially as practiced in the Roman Empire! A former Catholic seminarian, he left the order to teach in public schools.

After I graduated, he left teaching to pursue politics himself – becoming a 17-term Congressman before announcing his retirement in 2010, to be replaced by his younger nephew, Dan (who still represents Flint in Congress).

Gayle Heyn was my French teacher, who assured me that there was civilization beyond Flint – and it mostly spoke French! She became Gayle Kildee later, accompanying husband Dale to Lansing, then Washington.

Graham Provan was my U.S. history teacher. He taught me that American history wasn’t what I thought, by emphasizing its blemishes -- especially relevant in those days of civil rights struggles in the South.

Collectively, they showed me how politics equates with power.

The high school debate team (where I earned a varsity letter) can’t be ignored, either. It taught me about logic, argumentation, and research.

Yet, I pursued none of this after college. I lost something when I left Flint – where did it go?