Saturday, April 3, 2010

Flint Fires: Wellington Street


Tara Sifferman, a Flint resident, took several shots of a Thursday morning fire at 211 W. Wellington. The fire destroyed two houses and damaged a third. Go here to see Sifferman's photos in The Flint Journal. And there were more fires Friday night.



2 comments:

  1. Just last week my mom, who hadn't seen the "new Flint" since she moved to Ann Arbor three years ago, toured our old neighborhood near Nebraska and Franklin. The house two doors to our east had burned half-way (second storey); the little place set back from the street two doors to the west had been bulldozed but not cleared; and of course, she was unprepared for the empty lot which was once AC Spark Plug.

    My Dad taught at Whittier from 1958 through 1988 when he retired, and died just five years ago, so he wasn't a witness to this decline. He'd lived in the same house since 1938 or so.

    And I can't even go drown my sorrows at Hat's Pub.

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  2. Betty, those return visits can be tough. I've been lucky in that my old street near Bassett Park still looks good. And my grandmother's old house on Illinois Avenue is still owned and cared for by the same person who purchased it when my Grandma died in 1987. But there are plenty of other personal landmarks that have disappeared.

    By the way, my family lived in a house on Nebraska just off Franklin when my older brother was born. This would have been back in the early fifties. Had to be near your place.

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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.