Black Lives Matter

Photographer Jake May of MLive.com highlights local artists and volunteers who painted a Black Lives Matter mural on a block of Martin Luther King Avenue near downtown Flint on June 14. See the series of photos here.

Flint Postcards: Downtown Flint

Flint Photos: Flint Springs Water and Ice Co. Wagon

Flint Photos: Downtown Flint in 1958

Downtown Versus Neighborhoods: The Flint City Council Decides the Fate of the Capitol Theatre

Talk to residents out in many Flint neighborhoods and it doesn't take long to realize there's a growing divide between neighborhood interests and downtown interests, often represented by Uptown Development and the Flint & Genesee Chamber. Look no further than the looming showdown in the Flint City Council over the transfer of a property tax freeze that Uptown says is key to rehabilitating the historic Capitol Theatre.

MLive's Dominic Adams reports:

Flint City Council Eric Mays said he supported the tax freeze under the past ownership but has not made his mind up on the transfer request. 

"I want the residents to come out and weigh in on that," said Mays, adding he believes there are other legal issues that need to be clarified before the council can vote. 

Councilwoman Monica Galloway, who represents the theater's ward, said Wednesday she is still gathering information about the proposal and declined further comment.

Flint Postcards: New Union Industrial Bank Building

Flint Postcards: Souvenir of Flint, Mich.

Flint Postcards: Bryant Hotel

Making Ground-Level Retail Work for Cities

Over the past few years, ground floor retail businesses have slowly returned to downtown Flint. It may not be the bustling shopping district of the fifties, but it's a vast improvement over the ghostly Saginaw Street of the nineties.

Writing in the June issue of The Urbanist, Benjamin Grant tackles the nuances, history, and challenges of street-level retail.

Ground floor retail has its origins in the homes of urban artisans in medieval and Roman cities. Where fortifications put space at a premium, the family home was often above the family workshop, and business was conducted through an opening onto the street. 

By the late 18th century, workshops were giving way to factories, and, in Paris and London, plate glass and gaslight helped create the urban storefront as we know it — a space for shopping, not making. In the 19th century, the era of the flaneur, the street itself was reinvented as a genteel public space, and grand treelined boulevards played host to a fashionable parade of shopping, self-presentation and spectacle. 

Modernist architects like Le Corbusier were suspicious of commerce, and found the tight, clamorous spaces of the 19th-century city oppressively filthy and congested. They sought to “free the ground plane” by raising their towers on stilt-like pilotis, so that citizens might wander through a new species of park-like city at their ease, never channeled into something as vulgar as a street. These architects peeled apart the city’s mixture, and in doing so they created separate sectors for offices, factories and homes, and built pedestrian sky bridges over sweeping expressways. The intended spaces of discovery became spaces of desolation. 

In the mid-to-late 20th century, the car was king. In subdivisions, shopping malls, housing projects and office complexes, inward looking, single-use environments were the norm. For nearly half a century, urban development in the U.S. got an almost total pass from pedestrian considerations. leaving a legacy of blank walls, narrow or non-existent sidewalks and dead spaces. 

In the 1960s, critics like Jane Jacobs and architects like Oscar Newman and Jan Gehl began investigating exactly what it was that made traditional urbanism (then under attack) work so well. They zeroed in on the interaction of building edges, public streets, and social interaction, creating some of the classic analyses in urban design. Their efforts revolutionized urban design, and their emphasis on the human scale — once dismissed as quaint and unscientific — has become planning orthodoxy. 

Today, walkable streets enlivened by active uses are a widely shared priority, critical to supporting transit, reducing carbon emissions and tackling chronic diseases. But bringing streets to life – especially outside city centers – can be quite a challenge.

Flint's economic situation poses daunting obstacles to retail development, but the city is not alone in facing numerous struggles to help street-level stores, restaurants, and other businesses gain a foothold. Grant presents a good overview of the challenges and successes of street-level retail in the San Francisco Bay Area. Obviously, a very different scenario than Flint, but there are many similarities. Ground-level retail isn't the easiest enterprise to pull off, even in a booming economy:

Just because planners allow, or even require, ground floor retail spaces, does not mean there will be ground-floor retail. Retailers, who live and die according to foot traffic, visibility and neighboring stores, are very sensitive to both location and quality of their spaces and they are well aware that if you build it, customers won’t automatically come.
Planners don’t create cafes (or restaurants or grocery stores) and for the most part, neither do developers. Entrepreneurs do. It is true that a building without a storefront will never contain a store. On the other hand, the world is full of empty storefronts. The weakness of ground-floor retail in mixed-use construction is so notorious that developers routinely write it off, assuming no revenue at all.

But it's clear that making downtown Flint a welcoming gathering place is a key part of improving the city, along with helping the city's neighborhoods rebound from abandonment and decay.

Public life is the essence of urbanism. The city’s ability to facilitate movement, commerce, democracy, innovation and creativity resides in the currents and eddies of human beings at the boundary of public and private space, where homes, jobs, shops and civic buildings touch streets, parks and plazas. 

In a good urban neighborhood, the ground floors of the buildings work symbiotically with the surrounding sidewalks and public spaces. Together they provide a continuous network of pathways and experiences that are active, safe, comfortable and engaging. The ground-floor café (and retail more generally) is but one of many good ways for buildings to meet the street. After all, even a coffee-crazed town like San Francisco can’t have a café — or even retail — in every building. A good city requires solutions as varied as its fabric and its people and must constantly invent new ones.

Flint Photos: You Auto Buy Now

Flint Photos: Downtown Flint in the Fifties

Flint Photos: Buckingham's Department Store Fire

 Firefighters respond to a fire at Buckingham's Department Store in downtown Flint in the 1940s.

Flint Photos: Downtown Flint in the 1920s

Downtown Flint Without Genesee Towers

Thanks to Wade Merrill for this Photoshop fantasy of what Flint will look like without the city's tallest (abandoned) Building.

Flint Photos: Saginaw and 2nd Streets, c. 2006

On the left is the former home of The Vogue clothing store. It later became the second location of The Copa nightclub before it was demolished. See a more recent view here. Thanks to Grumkin for another great photo.

Flint Photos: Kobacker Building Demolition in 1979

Paul and David Mata in downtown Flint near the Kobacker Building during its demolition in 1979. (Photo by Pedro Mata)

Flint Photos: Riverbank Park in 1979

Riverbank Park in 1979, shortly after construction and before the sculpture in the background collapsed. Thanks to David Mata for the photo.

Flint Photos: Downtown, 1979

Sure glad they tore down all these great old buildings to make room for the wild success that was Water Street Pavilion and the Hyatt Regency. Thanks to David Mata for the photo.

MSU Medical Students Coming to Flint

Here's a little good news. The old Flint Journal building in downtown Flint will soon be home to an estimated 100 third- and fourth-year medical students from Michigan State University, along with MSU public health researchers.

Shaun Byron of Mlive reports: 

MSU's College of Human Medicine had announced plans in late 2011 to expand its medical education and public health programs in Flint, utilizing a $2.8 million grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

The property consists of 200,000 square feet of building space and more than 5 acres of land.

The lease includes about 40,000 square feet of office and teaching space in the building, according to a press statement from MSU officials.

Flint Postcards: Flint from the Air

Here's a not-so-fun game, can you identify the buildings that are no longer with us?