Re:Flint, MI: So much lead in children’s blood, state of eme...
by DougWebb on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @06:46PM
(#10741360)
There's a spot like that near me. https://goo.gl/maps/jSVLtA5qQix is Thomas Edison's lab, now a museum and historic landmark. Right up the street on the next block is a huge fenced-off abandoned building complex. https://goo.gl/maps/gskvqGi89kz. The immediate neighborhood isn't bad, but within a few miles are the towns of East Orange and Irvington which have a lot of poverty and crime, and they are next to some of the rougher parts of Newark which are even worse.
EDIT: I noticed a "STYLECRAFT CLOTHING" sign on that abandoned building, and found this: https://books.google.com/books?id=jNwDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA302&ots...
It's an ad from a 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics for "Furniture Repair Kit". Neat.
For example https://goo.gl/maps/AviSiJQBcEH2 is the office and https://goo.gl/maps/jWHBmk51nxw is the factory for the Durant-Dort Carriage company (which would eventually evolve into General Motors). And yet, on that same block theres abandoned houses and burned down lots. I lived 1 block from there while building a hardware startup (http://lava.io). Theres a great heritage of DIY and Entrepreneurship on the streets of flint. Even today there's a pretty cool group of entrepreneurs working there to found companies and make big change.
I live in SF now, and it's interesting to draw parallels between SF circa today and Flint circa 1910. Once upon a time Flint was the Silicon Valley of our country, and now it's a wasteland long forgotten by the industry that built it. Definitely makes me wonder what some parts of the bay area might look like 100 years from now.