Friday, October 28, 2011

Flint Postcards: "Be It Ever So Humble There's No Place Like Home" in Flint, Mich.



5 comments:

  1. I'm guessing this is some early factory housing? Postcard is dated 1911.

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  2. I bet you're right. There was a shortage of housing when factories were ramping up. Lots of tents went up too. Amazing.

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  3. I bet their first winter in that place was fun!

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  4. This is very similar to how my house in San Francisco started out in 1904. It is charitably described as "lightly constructed" meaning it doesn't really have enough beams or trusses to properly support the house by today's standards. It shakes when you walk though certain rooms. It began as one room, and it has had about five little additions added on over the years, expanding to its current 710 sq. ft. Maybe the shakiness is why it survived the 1906 quake and all the others.

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  5. It might have survived the earthquake but not the Beecher tornado.

    Flint had more stringent code requirements from way back as I remember. I suspect this was outside the City of Flint.

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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.