Vehicle City, The Arches, and the Boom Years
Near Flint, Michigan
By nineteen sixty, Flint, Michigan was the second largest city in the state with nearly two hundred thousand people. General Motors employed eighty thousand workers in the Flint area alone. The plants ran three shifts, the houses filled with auto workers from Alabama and Mississippi and Poland and Hungary, and the money flowed through local businesses in ways that made the city feel, to everyone who lived there, like the center of the world.
Walk down Saginaw Street today and look up. The arches overhead, with the words Vehicle City illuminated in neon, are reproductions of arches that first went up in eighteen ninety-nine. Back then, the city council wanted to demonstrate that Flint had electricity and ambition, and so they commissioned five steel arches mounted with fifty light bulbs each to span the main street. In nineteen oh five, in honor of the city's fiftieth anniversary, new arches went up carrying the phrase Vehicle City, a direct acknowledgment that Flint was producing more horse-drawn carriages by volume than anywhere else on earth.
The original arches came down in nineteen nineteen when traffic lights arrived and the city needed the intersections clear. The phrase stuck, though. It stuck through the transition from carriages to automobiles, through the Depression, through two world wars, through the long postwar boom when Flint was producing Buicks in volumes that would seem almost impossible today.
Buick City, the massive plant complex on the northeast side of the city, employed nearly thirty thousand workers at its peak in the nineteen fifties. The Flint Truck Assembly plant and the Chevy-in-the-Hole complex along the river added tens of thousands more.
The arches you see now were rebuilt in two thousand two. They glow the same amber as the originals. They stand as a reminder of what this city was at its peak, the place where the American working class found something rare: a factory wage that could pay for a house, a car, a family vacation, a retirement.
That wage was not given. It was won.
