Saturday, August 30, 2008

From fruit to freeway


The oddly punctuated Jame's Fruit Market near the corner of W. Boulevard Drive and N. Dort Highway in the early 1950s. The photo is another in a series of slides taken by Mary Fisher. (Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

And now, the corner as it looks today from the air, courtesy of Google Maps.




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6 comments:

  1. Is this not a photo of the Big D Party Store? The building closest to the curb on Dort between Stewart and Boulevard Dr. Looks like it to me. You can probably still get fruit there, but only in liquid form- Passion Fruit Champale, Concord Grape MD 20/20, Orange Driver, etc.

    Across the street from Big D lurked the impossibly small, oddly named, and infinitely eerie "Bar Bucks Bar". Short-lived (I was only aware of its existence from 1995-97 or so), it never actually appeared to be open. Never could muster enough nerve to enter, but I can only imagine what sort of insanity occurred inside that tiny brick hovel. Seems like it was demolished some years ago. R.I.P. Bar Bucks Bar.

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  2. Dig that crazy yellow stop sign. Didn't Flint employ yellow fire trucks as well?

    Uh, I seem to recall Bar Bucks Bar employing some sort of crazy punctuation as well. Was it "Bar Bucks Bar", Bar Bucks' Bar", or "Bar, Bucks Bar"... can't remember.

    The houses in the background were on Nevada Ave. in the long gone St. John St. neighborhood. St. John St. was Flint's first destination for immigrants and a polyglot ethnic enclave of the first order. At least that’s what I've been told. Most of the neighborhood was demoed in the early-mid 70s to make way for I-475, the sparsely occupied JP Cole industrial park, and apparently a McDonalds as well. Remnants still remain on the margins. I think Fairview Elementary School was used as a training facility for the FPD through the 1980s.

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  3. Were all the stop signs yellow back then? And, if so, when did they start painting them red?

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  4. I believe the Gross Point Inn was right across Dort Highway from the fruit stand/Big D Party Store. The building is abandoned now.

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  5. Well, the Big D Party Store is at 4101 N Dort Hwy, which is pretty much right at the corner of W. Boulevard Drive. I'd love to get a photo of it now.

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  6. call me crazy, but I may remember yellow stop signs... i remember my dad explaining to me how people thought red was more viewable than yellow and I didn't believe him.

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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.