Flint to Port Huron

Slept in until 8 this morning at the swank-enough Hampton Inn.  The breakfast room was big and bold, and the oatmeal hot and thick.  Hampton Inns have nice artwork featuring local flavors. The staff is friendly too.  Around 10, I headed for the Flint Museum campus. I think I was one of about ten people there. And it is a campus well worth visiting.  OK, I didn't stop in the auditorium, which, as seen below will be featuring Sinbad, Shrek, Rick Springfield, and Rock of Ages.

The key to Flint having a museum campus is "endowment." This is GM's birthplace, and its founding fathers supported the arts and sciences. The history muesum is the Alfred P. Sloan (of the Sloan Foundation) Musuem, and it is good, quirky, unique, and even a little edgy.  They were running a musical version a movie depicting of the signing (singing?) of the Declaration of Independence with Paul Lynde-like actors portraying Ben Franklin, et al.  All this was in the middle of the wackiest doll collection I'd ever seen.  Some featured below.

What would a Flint history musuem be without a special muscle car exhibit?  Sloan did not disappoint.  Below are a souped up Nova SS as well as an AMC offering of George Romney's vision of muscle cars for everyone.

And like Lansing, Flint likes big wheel lumber-hauling devices, such as seen below.

Flint got its start much as South Bend, in the carriage-making business.  Here is an advanced carriage for fighting fires.

Flint's Red days are fully and sympathetically explored.  Here is a headline from some pre WWI rabble-rousing.

Flint was (and to a certain extent, is) home to big, big plants for Chevrolet, Buick, and others.

The "Sit Down Strike" of 1937 is fully explored and depicted.

Apparantly the UAW women's guild played an instrumental role in bringing the fuss to an end by smashing windows in front of the national guard who were pointing machine guns at them.  Not sure of all the dynamics, but it was dramatic and remembered.

Everyone had a UAW picnic after the strike was over.

Gov. George Romney was doing some business below in trying to quell some 1960's race riots.

All in all, you get a strong sense from this museum that Flint really was consequential in many ways throughout the late industrial revolution. They were at the center of a lot of big happenings, from the forming of the modern factory, to a huge war effort, to post-war booming, and late 20th century decay. Driving around town later, you see lot of grit, and a lot of activity. It is by no means dead. My Volt's gasoline engine was made in Flint. There is a Chevy truck assembly plant here going full tilt. There's a lot of tattooed citizens on the street, many of them looking ornery. The place has some spunk.

And it has a world class art museum, the Flint Institute of Arts.  It's funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, a major international philanthropy.  CSM was the Mayor of Flint, and one of the original partners in GM. He put together a wonderful museum that I found myself in for four hours. I think there were about five people there!

I started with a fine lunch, chicken wrap, fresh plum, jalapeno chips, and Orange Crush, seen below.

Then to the museum. I couldn't photograph the many visiting exhibits. One simply outstanding one was on American abstract expressionism. Featured were Pollack, Rothko, De Kooning, et al. And they played a fascinating 55 minute DVD from 1991's PBS "American Masters". I'm not sold on the art form at all, but I was sold on the seriousness of the artists.

They also had a fine exhibit mainly of Dutch masters of the early modern era. Rembrandt, and others were featured.  I felt like I was back in Holland, as I recogonized many of the street scenes. Could not photo these either, which were on loan from Louisville's Speed Museum.

The Asian pottery was shootable; some is seen below.

I liked the following rooms from the permanent collection.  Several photos follow.

I then tried to see the planetarium, but the last show had shown, so I drove to the Fisher Body Plant on South Saginaw Street, where the building once stood which housed the Sit-Down Strike, remembered below.

A nearby Chevy dealer took my photo with my Flint-forged engine.  The dealership has been in Flint since 1928, and is about 1/4 mile from the Sit-Down-Strike site. 

Here is the famous "Vehicle City" archway, actually one of a series of archways, in downtown Flint on Saginaw Street.

Had an afternoon crepe at the Flint crepery.  Don't let crepes fool you.  These streets are otherwise mean!

The crepe was followed by a one hour trek to Port Huron, MI, on the Canadian border.  I checked into the Marriott Fairfield Inn---ok, but not nearly as nice as the Flint Hampton Inn.  Port Huron's roads are under serious construction, and GPS is a guidance at best in such a situation.  I took down some directions to eats on the coast. The Quay Brewpub was tepidly ok.  My Parmesian whitefish was acceptable, but not spectacular. 

After dinner, I drove down by the river.  Saw a large freighter really moving rapidly down the river, but I was too far away to get a good photo.  The lighthouse boat below was going nowhere, so I shot it, along with the Blue Waters Bridge in the background.

Nearby is a stationary lighthouse.  I hear they are always picturesque.