AND THEN, THERE'S THE DISNEYLAND SOLUTION
Zwerdling, Daniel
And then There's the Disneyland Solution BY DANIEL ZWERDLING Around Flint, folks call it Generous Motors," a fender press operator told me. And tangled in the love-hate relationship between the...
...The Magic Word: Attitude," the sticker read...
...But then the layoffs came and unemployment in Flint reached 25 per cent...
...It opened last November, all marble fountain elegance and a harp player in the lobby, a soaring atrium with dangling vines, glass-enclosed elevators, and a Jacuzzi...
...He's busy on a deal for a new business in which employees would work for the minimum wage and a share of the profits, if there are any...
...Why would any investor want to build a luxury hotel in Flint...
...It used to be a lovely place, lined with old brick buildings, with the kind of turn-of-the-century masonry you don't see much of any more...
...He worked at Fisher Body...
...He gestured toward the tubes angling past his front door...
...That's a sort of sad way to advertise," I said: "Come to Flint, town where people are desperate...
...The real story in Flint, the mayor suggested, is not how the city surrendered millions of dollars over the past five years by giving tax breaks to GM, or how local banks invested most of their money in the auto corporation instead of the community...
...One minute they were there and the next they weren't...
...Every time one of you reporters comes in here, you're expecting that this community, with all of these things that you talk about, [is] going to fall apart," Rutherford says...
...the rest came from the Mott Foundation and private investors, including Rolling Stone Mick Jagger...
...But there is almost nobody and nothing there...
...Virtually every second store is boarded up with plywood...
...until the recession hit, the chances were eight in ten that anyone you met on the street worked for GM...
...GM hired Southern blacks and poor Appalachians and Middle West farm families, and paid them wages they had only dreamed of back home...
...Since 1908, General Motors factories have encircled and nourished the city—Buick, Chevrolet, Fisher Body, AC Sparkplug, and others, making every conceivable part of an automobile from the window rollers to the final product...
...garbage collection has been cut back to twice a month and the rat control program eliminated altogether...
...the city's revenues have dropped 25 per cent in the past few years...
...One of the few stores I found still open on a recent Saturday afternoon was Baker's Drug Store...
...And on my visit there wasn't much going on around Hyatt's entrance on a Saturday evening—no crowds (the hotel management is laying off dozens of staff), no cars streaming in and out, just the sounds of a clanging flagpole...
...His office walls are covered with photos of him shaking hands with the famous...
...This is Flint's version of urban renewal, high tech style...
...He paused...
...It's getting bad...
...We'll never attract the big manufacturing jobs again," Jack Liztenberg, the city's economic development director, told me...
...They're boarding up more than stores in Flint...
...He pauses...
...I think we had four customers today...
...So Liztenberg has been trying to raise money to build a business "incubator," where the city could nurture fledgling enterprises with low rent, low-cost loans, and technical assistance until they're strong enough to make it on their own...
...if the Hyatt falters, the city gets nothing, but Northwest Mutual gets the entire place for its investment of $12 million...
...Mayor Jim Rutherford told me he's fed up with all these stories about how bleak Flint has become...
...In some cases it is a desperate type of search...
...Local merchants and others doubt that a luxury hotel and an automobile fantasyland can save their economy and community...
...The mayor's a fool," says druggist Baker, as he waits for his fifth customer of the day...
...People are willing to take lower wages because you have people in drastic situations right now in Flint," Litzenberg says...
...Rutherford showed me a picture on his wall, near a photo of Hubert Humphrey, of a horse with a cap and a toothy grin leaning against a lamppost...
...He envisions dozens of small factories one day, with thirty or forty employees each, making ceiling fans, perhaps, or the hardware for Michigan's nascent oil and gas industry...
...Most didn't, and so city leaders cobbled together a deal to build this one: The key was $6 million in Federal development funds, which helped guarantee the major $12 million investment by Northwest Mutual Life Insurance Company...
...Maybe that's Flint's dream...
...That's Fred the Horse, who will be our official Auto World symbol," the mayor said...
...Investors have shunned Flint for years because of its high wages geared to United Auto Workers contracts, but now city officials are trying to lure capital with a new pitch: Come to Flint, where folks won't turn their noses up at minimum-wage work...
...I stopped by one of the few stores that was not encased in plywood, Big Boy's Barbershop...
...And tangled in the love-hate relationship between the community and its giant corporation, most people almost mean it...
...From the Jacuzzi window you can see two other large hotels down the street— they're both boarded up now...
...The city spent $800,000 last fall installing these things, which city officials hope will attract more shoppers...
...That's not how we put it, but let's be truthful about the whole thing," Litzenberg said...
...But Jack Litzenberg says Flint has to do something dramatic to prevent the next generation of workers from leaving home to find work...
...For weeks before the grand opening, the Flint Journal covered the construction in breathless detail, soliciting letters from readers on "What the Hyatt Regency will mean to Flint" and sponsoring a contest to see who could guess the correct number of windows and pillows...
...Automobiles will always play an important role in Flint's economy, local officials told me, but they're finally realizing the industry will never boom back to what it was...
...He wanted to close but I said, 'No, we'll stay open till five.' There's always a hope that we might get some customers...
...On opening day, high school bands paraded downtown, and the governor weighed in with a piece of official optimism ("A new Flint is rising on the foundations of the old...
...But Flint boosters say the Hyatt will flourish, and to see why, to see things as they do, you have to look across the Flint River from the hotel at a large tract of land, squint your eyes and picture the next step in the comeback strategy: the site of a hoped-for $60 million shrine to the auto industry, called Auto World—"a combination Disneyland and automobile museum," as Mayor Rutherford describes it...
...I'm proud of our family tradition, and I've tried to keep it going," Baker said, "but it doesn't look like it's going much longer...
...It's "the vehicle to reverse downtown Flint's fortunes," as the Flint Journal put it...
...Saginaw, the main street, is paved with bricks, and the sidewalks are shaded by awnings...
...I was just coming home and I was surprised that there were boards and everything over the house...
...A photo of an unidentified worker "putting finishing touches on parking deck lamppost" got better play than the war in El Salvador...
...They were neighbors," said Norma Adams, painting her nails and watching television with the children...
...You can drive all over in this subdivision and there's quite a few houses boarded up...
...Flint is a 1982 ghost town...
...The story in Flint, Rutherford said, is how the city is fighting back against the GM layoffs, and surviving...
...Brian and Joanne Baker have set up a big display in their windows—"100 Years Downtown," the sign says, and the windows are filled with old medicine bottles and photos of Baker's father and grandfather...
...It's something that's crazy enough to succeed...
...She paused...
...We're not going to fall apart...
...Some businesses have fled to suburban malls, the rest of them have simply folded...
...the Flint City Seal, featuring a 1950s-style V-8 automobile with soaring tail fins, hangs on the wall behind his expansive desk...
...But I think you got to have vision and you got to have hope, and I think Auto World is a hope and a vision...
...I passed miles, literally miles, of abandoned stores—closed supermarkets, closed auto body shops, closed fast-food restaurants (and over it all a billboard advertising tax-free all-savers certificates...
...Then suddenly, just past the boarded-up Vehicle City Golf Shop and the cemetery, a bizarre vision: for nine blocks, huge, bright-orange metal tubes zig-zagged along the sidewalks at waist level, ending in an orange-tube sign, "New Flint North...
...If the hotel makes money, the city could earn $1 million a year...
...Local leaders have taken to the Hyatt as uncritically as a drowning victim clutching a life raft...
...added, with a short nervous laugh...
...It takes more than a hotel to save a town...
...Downtown Flint is dying, yes, but this looked like the rubble after a riot...
...Auto World will have rides and fun houses, and a giant three-story engine that people can walk through," Rutherford says, "and the whole thing will be covered by a weatherproof plastic dome...
...Clifton Hunter, the proprietor, was giving a customer a shave...
...If you were a conventioneer looking for fun," says Joanne Diaz, who stamps hoods out of sheet metal at Chevrolet Metal Fab, "Flint would not exactly be on your agenda...
...Along Western Road I heard barking dogs and the hollow sounds of hammering as a carpenter entombed the latest victim of a bank foreclosure...
...Flint Is Alive and Well...
...That's for 'em to sit on 'cause they ain't going to be working," he said...
...But the symbolic heart of Flint's struggle to save itself must be the Hyatt—the brand new, $32 million Hyatt Regency Hotel that rises sixteen stories above the desolate downtown...
...The business is terrible," Joanne Baker Daniel Zwerdling is a correspondent for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered...
...As I left his office the mayor handed me a bumper sticker from a stack on his desk...
...We think the Hyatt and Auto World can draw one million tourists each year...
...The plywood is spreading like a pox through neighborhoods of trim ramblers and two-story brick homes...
...I think Flint needs to dream dreams, in the nightmare they're going through right now...
...I guess it does make it look better outside...
...The General Electrics, the Whirlpools—these kinds of companies won't come to Flint, they'll go to the Sunbelt...
...To see one small save-the-town strategy at work, I drove north up Saginaw, through the downtown, past the sprawling one-mile-long Buick complex, into the "north end"— the black side of town...
...But we think we could make Flint a good town again for small business...
...But to see what 25 per cent unemployment does to a community, take a stroll down Saginaw Street to the middle of town...
...Flint has to diversify," Litzenberg said...
...But the Hyatt is more than just another hotel...
...But as far as helping the business, if there's nobody working the business can't be helped...
...Sure, it's hard to comprehend something of that nature in Flint, Michigan," he says...
...You can tick off the classic symptoms as if you were reading a medical chart: Bankruptcy and mortgage foreclosure rates have set records...
...So the Hyatt is the first step toward changing Flint's image—from a factory town to the tourist mecca of the Middle West...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
