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Joel Rash and friends built Flint, Michigan, on rock and roll.
By Stephen Zacks
The Metropolis Observed
November 2002
In the 1980s, when Joel Rash began booking punk-rock shows in the abandoned
buildings of downtown Flint, Michigan, it was hard to imagine that a punk
scene might be just what the ailing city needed. But the presence of a subculture
spawned new life in the area, much like what squatter artists did for New
York's Soho in the 1970s. In fact Rash triggered a minor real-estate boom
in 1994 when he bought the Economy Building to open a rock club, Local 432,
on still depressed Saginaw Street, Flint's main drag. Last year his transition
from king of the underground to pillar of the community was completed when
the Community Foundation of Greater Flint hired him to coordinate its Downtown
Facade Improvement program, the first effort to restore the storefronts
of Saginaw Street since the shutting down of General Motors factories two
decades ago. Stephen Zacks talked to Rash about Flint's history of failed
redevelopment schemes, the value of local architecture, and the role of
music in the rebirth of cities.
What was it like downtown when you first started booking punk-rock
shows at the Capitol Theater?
Downtown Flint in the fall of 1987 was a pretty alien place, but everything
had that magic of discovery. The buildings were so solid and had such a
history; there was a sense of wonder knowing that I was walking the streets
that my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had walked. Even
in the mid-eighties, though, buildings were getting knocked down left and
right in this frantic effort to outpace the blight. I'd walk by them a few
times, and the next thing you know there'd be a crane and a wrecking ball
there.
We made contact with the son of the owner of the Capitol Theater when we
heard that they might let us do concerts there. I took a walk through it,
and he showed me the theater--which was too big--and the upstairs space,
but the ceiling was way too low. So we walked down to the basement, and
it was just the perfect space: ten-foot ceilings, completely out of the
way, no windows, good parking nearby.
Did the landmark character of the building influence you to think
in a different way about the architecture of the city?
We knew that it was an amazing place. It had been used for concerts in the
late 1970s--the Fat Boys played there, and Mel Tillis, a really eclectic
assortment of people--but it hadn't been used for that in a long time. We'd
get flashlights and tool belts and go running through all these rooms
checking them out. Architecture is important because it inspires and provokes--it
makes you consider the past and reflect on how you will leave a legacy
for the future. Flint had a history written in brick and mortar. Our shows
were a small rebirth in the depths of the defunct Capitol Theater, and we
felt that we were adding to the history.
Do you think that music--and culture generally--plays an important role
in the survival of cities?
I think the general despair of the eighties and the feeling that nothing
would get better no matter what you did bred a generation that kind of vowed
to be the dance band on the Titanic. But if you look at what brings
cities back, it is music and culture. It's the urban pioneers who
are there because they have no choice. Our goal is to make a space that,
if or when Flint comes around, has the staying power to cope with the inevitable
rise in rents and the pressure from newer neighbors who don't understand
that these kids with crazy hair and funny clothes, instead of being the
bane of downtown, are actually part of the group saving it.
Has the thinking changed in Flint about the value of local architecture
and historic preservation?
It has. Flint had a succession of monkey-see, monkey-do projects in the
early eighties. The first one, the Radisson Hotel, was way too big
and upscale for a city like Flint. The Windmill Place food court was hugely
successful at first, but a year later the festival marketplace concept
became all the rage--Boston had Faneuil Hall, there were about a dozen of
them across the country--so we had to build one. We knocked down an entire
city block of buildings, little retail operations, all of which had office
space above them where dentists and lawyers and accountants practiced. The
festival marketplace immediately killed off Windmill Place, stole some of
their vendors and a good chunk of their business. It ended up dooming them
both. Auto World, the theme park about cars, fell smack-dab in the middle
of this. Flint could have used a premier auto museum to house antique car
models, historical archives, a research institute, or educational programs,
but instead we turned it into a three-ring circus with an IMAX theater and
amusement-park rides. Auto World is what politicized me locally: the crowning
failure of this line of silver-bullet solutions, the idea that you could
throw millions of dollars at downtown and fix it in one fell swoop.
Even while all these projects were going up, the National Trust for Historic
Preservation had already founded the Main Street program. The whole New
Urbanism movement was interested in keeping things to scale and preserving
historic architecture, and Flint just missed it. The Saginaw Street corridor
used to have historic-district status, but so many historic properties were
demolished that that status was pulled.
I think it took the feeling of hitting rock bottom to get people to consider
different ideas. The collective vision has moved away from a couple of people
talking about a pipe dream. Lots of abandoned buildings have been purchased;
many of them hadn't had any effort or even thought put into them in decades.
And now it's looking like the brick pavers on Saginaw Street are going to
be retained and repaired, these historic Vehicle City arches are hopefully
going up next year, and our streetscape plan will put in new sidewalks and
replace the big aluminum 1970s cobra lights with more period and human-scale
lighting.
How did the Downtown Facade Improvement program come about?
In part it came about through Clark Tibbits, a Flint native who had worked
at the C. S. Mott Foundation and spent most of his time in Asheville, North
Carolina, overseeing this amazing downtown revitalization they had there.
They looked at Saginaw Street and figured that part of the reason downtown
had so many vacancies was because of the condition of the properties themselves,
and that a facade program might be a way to restore some of their historic
character and spur development.
A couple of years ago I sold the Economy Building and used the money to
buy another one, the old beauty school, and I asked around to see if I could
get some money to improve the facade. So when the foundation started the
program, they thought of me and said, "We need someone to put this
together. Are you interested?" We built the facade program from the
ground up--put together a committee and developed all of the guidelines.
Now we're accepting applications, voting on projects, spending some dollars.
And this summer we'll actually see scaffolding up, painters and masons at
work, and new signs showing up.
Were you surprised when the city's establishment started seeing you,
the former punk-rock promoter, as a legitimate voice in the redevelopment
of downtown?
It seems so natural to me. I've always had a good relationship with city
hall, the county, the police and fire departments, and to a lesser
extent with the people involved in economic development in the town. I understand
that it must be kind of strange that the guy who used to deliver their lunch
on a skateboard and put on these punk-rock shows now occasionally shows
up in a jacket and tie to talk about a million dollars' worth of grant money
that's being focused on downtown Flint. Bill White, the president of the
C. S. Mott Foundation, still calls me "the skateboard guy." But
the values, mission, and goals that those shows held are really consistent
with what I'm doing now.
How did you adapt the facade program to fit the particular needs
of Flint?
There was some concern from building owners at first over the involvement
of the Genessee County Historical Society, that this committee was going
to be twelve rabid preservationists who had no sense of what business owners
needed and would put all of these tight strictures on the kinds of signs,
colors, and materials and make it prohibitively expensive to participate.
From the Secretary of Interior's Standards, which is a document two inches
thick, the committee came up with an eight-page document of guidelines.
The program trusts building owners to know what's best for them and trusts
the committee members themselves to make good decisions about what's appropriate.
That was something that I was really gratified by.
We've already tried these top-down solutions, these multimillion dollar
projects--the Ronald Reagan trickle-down theory--and all of those have proven
to be failures or even outright frauds. This puts the future of Flint directly
in the hands of the people who work, live, and own businesses here. That's
where I want it. I don't want to have to look to city hall for direction.
I don't want to have someone tell me what to do. I want the tools to be
able to do it myself.
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