Friday, May 3, 2013

Flint Postcards: Buick Factory from the Mott Foundation Building



6 comments:

  1. It's a pretty shot. Date?

    Why were all the cars parked between the Grand Trunk tracks and the river east of the Harrison Street bridge...possibly new/used car overflow from Downtown Buick?

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    1. The postcard is circa 1958. It can be viewed here:
      http://www.cardcow.com/168152/aerial-view-buick-motor-division-general-motors-corp-flint-michigan/

      It is postmarked Dec 4, 1958, but it might have been taken a few years earlier perhaps from the Sill Building.

      This was just before the construction of the "new" Post Office on East Boulevard Drive when that street was extended past the Farmer's Market, Fifth/Longway bridge, and to the Stevens Street bridge.

      I could not remember the exact date of the Post Office construction, and so I started to Google sleuth. I found two early, but undated postcards of the Post Office. As I started to look through some related postcards… Shazam! Like Kismet on the bonnie banks of the Flint River, I spied a dull version of this dated postcard of the Buick factory.

      I must have ridden past this lot many times in the family Chevy, but I cannot recall why the cars were parked there. Temporary overflow for Downtown Buick seems plausible. There may be a few flatbed car transport trailers parked toward the back of the lot.

      There are also two curious tall fences, perhaps 25-30' tall. One is along the railroad tracks, and another near the river. Perhaps these enclosed a prior junk yard. They also remind me a bit of the net fences at golf driving ranges, which might have been their one time purpose.

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    2. One correction. I did not carefully read the full postcard description on the cardnow website. The photo was taken from the Mott Foundation Building, not the Sill Building.

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  2. Eldridge LongfellowMay 5, 2013 at 6:58 AM

    See, Hear, Smell, and Feel the Heart of the Beast.

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  3. It looks, sounds, smells and feels like good-paying jobs to me. 8^)

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    1. Amen, it provided an opportunity for my brother to clime the employment ladder from the motor line up to a level seven personnel administration position while also putting in two tours with the USAF during the Korean police action. He took advantage of the stock savings program and retired out with a very comfortable income while still in his fifties. He loved his job in Planning and Scheduling and the training at IBM in New York. A new statistical application at Buick having to do with these new machines called computers.

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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.