I took a return trip to Flint, Michigan on March 20, 2013. This was only the second time I had been in the area since I left in 1980. My parents and brothers moved away in 1981, so there really wasn’t any reason to return. I say return to Flint because I lived there as a child. My dad worked in Flint. My parents shopped in Flint. We attended church in Flint for many years. I delivered the Flint Journal as news carrier, worked in Flint as a teenager, and we hung out in Flint. I have watched the demise of Flint from a distance with a strange fascination as Detroit and Flint worked their way up lists as the most dangerous, most violent, highest illiteracy, most impoverished, and the lowest cost real estate market. I watched with novel curiosity. It has been intriguing and a bit sad. I grew-up in Flint and in Holly, a town located 15 miles away, halfway between Flint and Pontiac. I went to church in Flint and Pontiac. I worked in Flint and Pontiac. We gathered with relatives in Flint. We shopped in Flint. We played in Flint at bowling alleys, movie theaters and video arcades. We listened to radio stations from Flint, and I was paperboy for the Flint Journal. I voraciously read the paper every day as I delivered it. It helped keep me warm during the cold Michigan winters, and I couldn’t wait to get back home at the end of the route to check-out baseball box scores. During my high school years I attended football and basketball games in Flint. On occasion, we cruised the streets in Flint. So, when I had a chance to return to Michigan, I headed to Flint. I listened to the radio as I drove U.S. 23 from Ann Arbor to Flint. The main story was about the death of 24 year-old Matthew Dewayne Williams. He had just become Flint’s 67th homicide victim of 2012. A new record for a place used to setting undesirable records. Williams languished in and out of hospitals for four months after being shot at a BP gas station on Clio Road just south Pierson road. Not only did I know the corner well, I was heading to that area. Williams grew up on Flint's north side and attended Flint Northwestern High School. As a child I swam at Northwester’s pool. The news story on the radio ended with the mayor stating, “Gun violence in Flint is at a historic high.” The BP gas station where Williams was shot is located at the edge of “Merrill Hood.” This is the most dangerous neighborhood, located in America’s most violent city. It is my childhood neighborhood. It’s runs between Pasadena and Sonny Avenues on the north and south, and between Dupont and Clio Streets on the east and west. I grew up a block east of Dupont Street. It now has one of the highest per capita rates of deadly crime in the county. It wasn’t that bad when I was growing up, but I could see it coming. It’s hard to describe the area. But the Flint Journal seemed to capture the essence of the Hood: “It’s a neighborhood where the vacant houses are too numerous to count, many with knee-high grass, shattered windows and busted-in doors. Thirty percent of families live below the poverty level in the Merrill neighborhood. It’s where a pizza deliveryman was shot and killed in a robbery earlier this year. And where children as young as 10 see all the violence as no big deal, because, well, it happens so often they’re immune to it. Here, even the neighborhood church locks its doors during the day when people are inside.” Williams wasn’t the only person shot that day in Flint. One hour earlier in the same neighborhood another man was shot and killed in his car outside a liquor store. In actuality, local police reported there were three shootings in one hour, during one day in Flint. Flint ranked as the most violent city in America in 2013. It had been ranked high for violence for years. Business Insider, noted, “We’ve been ranking America’s most dangerous cities for several years, and there’s one city that keeps making the top of the list — Flint, Michigan.” In 2013, MSNBC named Flint one the top five most miserable cities in America. I left the freeway and drove down Clio Road toward Carpenter Road. The streets had a vague familiarity. It’s been over 40 years since I lived here and the neighborhood had changed. I turned left on Carpenter Road, a main east-west road on the North end, and made my way up to Dupont Street. One block over was my childhood home at 525 West Russell. The home was gone. So were the two homes just west of our house. I wasn’t surprised since both homes were abandoned throughout my childhood. My parents cautioned my brother and me to never go into these homes. We didn’t listen. We wandered over a couple of times. There was graffiti and symbols spray painted on the interior walls, and large holes here and there with insulation poking through. Cigarette butts and bottles were strewn around the floor. In the daytime, the houses were just empty shells. At night they were downright scary. My bedroom window faced west toward the homes and I could look out at night and see lights moving around in them. Now, both homes were gone. In fact, there was no evidence that homes were ever there. In the 1960s Russell Street ended in front of the houses. Now there wasn’t even a street there anymore. I looked across the street and the two home there were gone too. A large vacant lot now lay where they once stood. Many homes were gone, vacant, or burnt out. Every once in awhile there was a driveway leading up to a lot with no home. One block east of my childhood home, I turned south. I saw a two-story home with where the upper story with charred around the windows. One block away to the south was another two-story home of the same architectural design. It too, had been burnt out. It was completely empty with black smoke residue around the windows and doors. The sidewalk running along the right side of the street was pulverized rubble. Weeds were growing through the fine rubble. On the street ahead, I could see spray painted arrows running up the street with concentric circles in the distance. As I got closer, I saw that the manhole cover in the center of the street was missing. The circles identified where it had once been. I later learned that people were stealing manhole covers and were selling them for scrap metal. I turned west and drove down the street behind my childhood home. I was looking for my school. I was struck by some of the homes with their small well-kept yards, freshly painted white fences and brightly painted facades, side-by-side with abandoned structures. The hearty homeowners impressed me by their desire to carve out a bit of civilized society in a place so ridden with blight and crime. I looked ahead and could see the three prefabricated buildings where I attended my first three years of grade school. These “units” were built blocks away from the main school, Gundry elementary. My parents once told me that these neighborhood school units were part of a great social education experiment in the 1960s. I’m not sure if it was true, but it sounded good. My first and second grade classroom buildings were abandoned with flaking paint. My third grade classroom was now a small white community church. I turned back onto Dupont and drove back toward Carpenter Road. I stopped at the location of Germer’s Drug Store. It was the closest store to us, and it was a place my parents shopped when they need a last minute items. As I sat looking at Germers both the experience and the feeling came back to me. It was no longer a drug store. It was now a liquor store with bars on the windows. The parking lot was crumbled and cracked. Time to move on. I drove down the road and stopped at the stoplight at Carpenter Road and Martin Luther King drive. The light was red for my direction and green for cross traffic, only there was no cross traffic. One week earlier at this location a man was shot in a drive-by shooting. He was sitting in his car waiting for the light to change. A car going the opposite way stopped suddenly next to the man. The window rolled down, and a man pulled out a gun, and shot the unsuspecting driver twice. He was hit in the shoulder and in the side. He was rushed to McLaren Hospital. Fortunately, for the driver the shots were not fatal. The light turned green and I continued down Carpenter Road with vacant houses running down both sides of the road. I drove east until I reached Saginaw Street, the main north-south thoroughfare through downtown Flint. I made it downtown just before 5:00 pm. All was quiet. The buildings were still there. Some were boarded up, others were empty, and still others looked the same. I looked around. There were no people. No cars. No movement. There wasn’t anybody walking in or out of any of the buildings. Occasionally, a single car drove by. I had seen this before. It was a movie. Was it Omega Man with Charlton Heston, or was it I am Legend with Will Smith? It really didn’t matter, both movies based on the same book. Those were movies, but here it was in real life. As children, my mother took us boys downtown every summer for sidewalk sales. Some streets were cordoned off between the stores to accommodate shoppers. The streets and sidewalks were choked with a mass of people. My mother held tight to my hand as I held my brothers hand. She would reach in with one arm and grab handful of pants and have us pull them over the pants we wearing. Women jostled each other as they pushed toward the tables of clothing. We would buy some clothes for back-to-school and then my mother took us to lunch at the downtown Kresge’s with its long lunch counter and eating area. The mass of people was overwhelming to me. It was a thriving, vibrant city. It was Flint, the second largest city in the state. It had all the promise to be a great city of the future. Now as I drove the empty streets, I felt alone. I turned and headed toward the Buick freeway. I looked at the dashboard clock as I merged onto the Buick Freeway. 5:12 p.m. As I accelerated onto the freeway, there was nothing to merge into it. There were no cars. It was rush hour in downtown Flint and there were no cars! I tried to balance my cell phone on top on the steering wheel so I could get a picture of rush hour with no cars. I drove a couple of miles. No traffic, no cars. I wondered for a moment if I was on a closed road. I looked in my rearview and I saw a car in the distance behind me. I drove to the LDS Flint Ward Chapel. This was one of my purposes in coming to Flint. I came to talk to local youth about going to college. I was quite a bit early. Fortunately, the building was open and it gave me the chance to talk to local church members before meetings. I met the young men’s president, who was a school teacher by profession. He had been a teacher in Flint but now he taught outside if the city. He had once lived in Flint, just north of downtown. Years earlier, they had bought a lovely home for a great price. He felt, that generally the neighborhood was good, but their home had been broken into three times. Each time valuable property was left untouched. No TV’s, appliances or electronics were ever taken. I was astounded. “What did they take?” I asked. “Food,” he responded, “They stole food.” I thought, “Oh my gosh, these people are hungry.” I briefly spoke to the youth group. I found a couple of them were interested in college. There were others who hadn’t even thought of it. I tried to hurry through my presentation because I knew that leaders wanted to get the youth out of the city before it got dark. I thanked them and drove back to the Freeway. I drove south. I knew about this trip a few weeks in advance. I have second cousins still living in the Flint area. I thought many times of trying to contact them. I should have tried, but I didn’t. A few miles down the road I got off the freeway and drove east toward Dort Highway. I knew this area well. My father and brother had both worked on Dort Highway, although at different times. I worked a mile west of Dort. I looked for the places where we all worked. I couldn’t find them. I looked for the old Eastside Buick dealership where my father worked. I couldn’t find it. Many of the buildings along Dort were empty and indistinguishable. My brother worked in the “Small Mall” near the AC Plant. I thought I saw it, but the potholes in the road were so bad I spent more time watching the road than I did looking for buildings. I was going to turn left on Bristol Road to look for the Flint Pool and Patio store I once managed, but I felt the impression that it was time to make my way back to the Buick Freeway. It was getting dark and I had concerns for the large potholes. I didn’t want to get stranded in this neighborhood in the dark. It was time to leave. I turned south on the freeway and I was alone again. Here was a beautiful four-lane freeway and no one was on it. This freeway was built when I was teenager. It was built for the future. Now here I was in the future and the freeway was empty. It was surreal.
I continued south down the freeway and I saw the Chevy Truck plant straight ahead. It was a familiar and memorable sight, and it was still operating! It actually warmed my heart as I saw something just as it had looked 30 years ago. Even better, there was a factory still operating in Flint. The streets of Flint were vaguely familiar, but the city had changed. The Buick plant was closed. Actually, it was gone. There was now just a big empty space where it had once been. There were trees and shrubs growing through the cracks of the old parking lot. The AC plant was closed. The Fisher Body plant was closed. The other Fisher Body plant was closed. The auto industry had left Flint, the birthplace of General Motors. I continued south on the Buick Freeway until it intersected with I-75 and I took the south interchange. It was now dark. About mile south of Bristol Road the freeway split, I-75 toward Detroit, and U.S. 23 to Ann Arbor. I could see the lights of Flint behind me in my rearview mirror.
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Flint MichiganEd Adams Archives
March 2021
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