An essay by Lileks.

I remember when this happened to Flint. When I was a kid, downtown had two movie theaters, a Walgreens (I think, or maybe it was a Ben Franklin) and Smith Bridgman’s and JC Penny were the major department stores. In the late sixties, the Eastland Mall opened on the eastern border of town, with a movie complex, and downtown started to die. Later, another was built on the west side, called Genessee Valley Mall (Genessee was the county) anchored by a Hudsons, the major Detroit department store that sponsored Detroit’s Thanksgiving parades. That finished the job.

Personally sadder to me, though, was the north end of town, where my grandparents liked. It was two blocks from Flint Park, an amusement park with a roller coaster, Ferris wheel and other rides, a dance hall and concert venue, as well as carnival games. I went to it as a very young child, but it closed in the early sixties. The neighborhood started to go downhill, and it became increasingly black as the prices declined. My grandmother stayed until she was put in a nursing home in the eighties, but the house that my mother had grown up in was demolished. You can now see where the amusement park was, and it would probably be an interesting archaeological dig, but if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never know it had been. It’s a woods, now, gone completely back to nature.

I should note that, like Lileks’ Fargo, the downtown was somewhat revitalized in the 80s, when when a new Flint campus of the University of Michigan was built there, but it’s nothing like the glory days.