Flint, MI

Flint built the American century's vehicle and its labour movement. General Motors was founded here in 1908, and the city's carriage-trade arches still read "Vehicle City"; three decades later, in the winter of 1936–37, the Flint Sit-Down Strike — workers occupying the plants for 44 days — won recognition for the United Auto Workers and changed American industry permanently. The city has since endured deindustrialisation and, from 2014, the water crisis that made its name a byword for civic betrayal; Flint's story is told here honestly, because the city itself insists on telling it.

What outsiders rarely expect is the Flint Cultural Center: a purpose-built campus assembled by mid-century auto philanthropy, where The Whiting — the 2,000-seat hall documented in this archive — stands beside the Flint Institute of Arts, one of Michigan's largest art museums, the Flint Institute of Music with its symphony orchestra and one of the nation's biggest community music schools, the Sloan Museum and a planetarium. Few American cities of Flint's size possess such a concentration, and none has needed it more. The Flint Symphony still plays, the youth ensembles still rehearse, and the city that taught America to make things is teaching it something about endurance.