The Flint Cultural Center and What a City Builds for Itself

In the decades after the Second World War, at the height of its prosperity, Flint made a decision that was not common for a midsize industrial city: it built a cultural campus on the north side of downtown and filled it with institutions that had nothing to do with making cars.

The Flint Cultural Center eventually encompassed thirty-three acres and included the Flint Institute of Arts, which became one of the largest art museums in Michigan. It included the Sloan Museum, dedicated to local history and natural science. It included the Robert T. Longway Planetarium, the Flint Public Library, the Whiting Auditorium, and the Flint Institute of Music. It was a deliberate act of civic investment by a city that was flush with automobile money and wanted to be something more than a factory town.

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, funded by one of GM's early shareholders, was central to this effort. The Mott Foundation had been investing in Flint's public institutions since the nineteen twenties, funding everything from community education to parks. When the city wanted a world-class cultural campus, the foundation helped build it.

The Whiting Auditorium, named for James Whiting, the Flint businessman who had originally recruited Buick to the city in the early nineteen hundreds, was renovated in the late nineteen nineties.

The cultural center still stands. The Flint Institute of Arts still holds its collection. The planetarium still runs programs for schoolchildren. The museum still tells Flint's history, including the parts that are hard to tell.

In a city that has watched its economic foundations collapse and its population fall by more than half, the cultural center is one of the clearest arguments for what remains. The cars are gone from most of these streets. The art stayed.