Charting Decline on a Flint Street with Google Street View

It's easy to explore my old Civic Park neighborhood in Flint via Google Street View. Twenty years ago, the experience was more nostalgic than distressing. A digital trip down memory lane. 2402 Bassett Place and the neighboring house at 2406, once owned by the Bowden family, looked pretty much the same, even though the surrounding blocks were already in serious decline. But it was only a matter of time before Bassett Place caught up with the rest of Civic Park. 

AUGUST 2008

The crack down the middle of my old driveway has widened, reminding me of Andy Goldsworthy's Drawn Stone installation at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, though it obviously draws far less attention and adoration. Otherwise, the two houses look much like they did when I lived on Bassett Place in the 1970s and '80s. The low-resolution image helps hide the fading paint and less-than-pristine yards, but there would be no real cause for alarm if I drove down the old street in 2008.

JUNE 2011

A sunny day and higher resolution make the two houses look even better almost three years later. The pine and the chestnut trees provide some welcoming shade.

SEPTEMBER 2015

Just four years later, and it's all over. Both houses are boarded up. The screened-in front porch where my family gathered in the summer to watch baseball games across the street in Bassett Park is open-air now. The siding has been stripped from my childhood home, reverting back to the original minty green. 

JANUARY 2022

Almost seven years later, and the boards on the windows and doors of the two houses appear to be doing their job. The two structures look more or less the same in this winter scene. A closer look reveals that our old garage is a shell — the door is gone and there are large holes opening in the back. And the small white house to the south — once owned by the Procuniers and then the Kildees — hasn't survived. It's gone.

JUNE 2025

The houses are slowly returning to nature by summer 2025. The tall grass and encroaching shrubbery make it seem less bad and more of a natural progression. At least things are growing instead of rotting away. (Of course, the Google car may have cruised by between mowings by the city or the land bank, but if the decline is inevitable, at least it appears green and vibrant in what could be the last google images before these two abandoned houses disappear forever.)

Time Travel Is a Discretionary Art

Downtown Flint, Michigan in the 1950s (Photo by Mary Fisher)

"I find these days that a wistful form of time travel has become a persistent political theme, both on the right and on the left. On November 10 The New York Times reported that nearly seven in ten Republicans prefer America as it was in the 1950s, a nostalgia of course entirely unavailable to a person like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others. Meanwhile some on the left have time travel fancies of their own, imagining that the same rigid ideological principles once applied to the matters of workers’ rights, welfare, and trade can be applied unchanged to a globalized world of fluid capital."

— Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books, 2016

Longing for Nostalgia

"...but the weird thing about nostalgia is that it can make you nostalgic for experiences you never had. Objects in the rearview are more precious than they appeared...."
          - Christine Smallwood, Harper's, Dec. 2014

The Horror-Romance of Flint

I'm reading Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. This line reminded me of Flint. Not all of Flint, but a part of it, the part where my memories of the place meet the reality of present day.

I think about the feeling I've developed for the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it — its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It's a dumb feeling, but I don't want to shake it.

A Model Memory

Many Flint Expatriates have an ongoing relationship with nostalgia, often struggling to reconcile the Flint of their youth with the Flint of today. Then there's the inevitable moment when you realize you may be burnishing the memory of Vehicle City a bit too much, turning it into a place that never existed in the first place. It's not always an easy process to work through.

So why not simply recreate a scale model of the Flint you remember — or the Flint you want to remember? Michael Paul Smith is not from Flint, but he did build a scale model of his hometown.

"What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It's not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories," he writes on his Flickr page.

"And like a dream, many of the buildings show up in different configurations throughout the photos. Or sometimes, the buildings stay put and the backgrounds change.

"Visually, this is heading towards the realm of ART. NO PHOTOSHOP WAS USED IN THESE PICTURES. IT'S ALL STRAIGHT FROM THE CAMERA.

"It's the oldest trick in the special effects book:line up a model with an appropriate background and shoot. The buildings are 1/24th scale [or 1/2 inch equals a foot]. They are constructed of Gator board, styrene plastic, Sintra [a light flexible plastic that can be carved, and painted] plus numerous found objects; such as jewelery pieces, finishing washers and printed material."

Learn more about Smith from this interview at Man on the Move.

Cities Past and Present: The Photography of Jiang Pengyi

"Unregistered City No. 1," a photograph by Jiang Pengyi.

I thought these photographs captured the abstract nature of Flint that exists in the minds of many expatriates, especially those who left when the city was thriving and haven't returned. There's the Flint you remember living in — a happy place burnished by nostalgia — and then there's the Flint of today formed only by news reports, dire statistics, and your imagination. This abstract Flint isn't a real city, it's like a decaying architectural model locked away in a warehouse. But the shiny, prosperous Flint you remember probably isn't real either.

The photographer, Jiang Pengyi, is interpreting the intersection of the past and the present in a very different place: "My photographs of city, still objects and massive skyscrapers reduced to miniature sizes communicate my recurrent themes of excessive urbanization, redevelopment and demolition in the Beijing city."

More than a feeling

I'm reading the novel You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem, and I ran across a passage that touches on the amorphous feeling some expatriates have about Flint.

"What is your complaint, sir?"

"Same as always," said the complainer. "Nostalgia, except it's not just regular nostalgia. More like nostalgia vu. Longing for longing instead of the thing in question."

Less-than-total recall

As Morrissey once said, "The past is a strange place."

And it can be a tricky, unreliable place, as well. Flint Expatriates tends to traffic in memory and nostalgia, which means you should probably bring a healthy dose of skepticism with you when you read it.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert points out in his book Stumbling on Happiness that we don't store intact memories of complete events. We rack up little snippets and piece them back together, as needed:

"Remembering an experience feels a lot like opening a drawer and retrieving a story that was filed away on the day it was written, but...that feeling is one of our brain's most sophisticated illusions. Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread it."

And editors, as we all know, make mistakes. In his new memoir, The Night of the Gun, New York Times media writer David Carr details how the mistakes magnify when you add drugs and alcohol — two staples of Flint. Watch this video of Carr recounting one emblematic night and the slippery nature of memory.

The end of the affair

slick, who sells cars for a living, reflects on a time when buying a car actually meant something:

"Ah...the glory days...I remember when someone in the neighborhood bought a new car they parked it at the end of the driveway nearest the sidewalk and eventually all of the neighbors would wander over and take a look, inside, outside and under the hood.

"Today getting a 'new' car is like getting a new pair of socks, nobody cares. Usually we don't even know our neighbors and they could care less about what you drive.

"America and especially Michigan and more specifically Flint had a strong love affair with the automobile. Now it's gone from a love affair to a lackluster marriage out of necessity.

"The car manufacturers have removed all of the mystique and put out cars that rarely vary from the year before. Gone are the days of papering the showroom windows and keeping the new models under wraps. Somehow it was a much simpler and yet more exciting time with the automobile."