Flint was 'Vehicle City' before it ever built a car

The nickname came before the cars. Flint started calling itself “Vehicle City” in the 1890s, and back then it meant buggies — the city was one of the biggest makers of horse-drawn carriages anywhere, with the Durant-Dort Carriage Company turning them out by the wagonload. When General Motors was born here in 1908 and the buggy plants gave way to auto factories, the old boast just slid over to a new kind of vehicle and kept right on fitting.

The proudest version of that boast hung over the street. In 1899 the city strung electric lights across Saginaw Street on steel arches, a dazzling thing in an age when most towns still ran on gas lamps, and a few years later a crowning arch went up spelling out the name in bulbs. For two decades the arches glowed over downtown, the closest thing Flint had to a front door. Then, in 1919, they came down — too many automobiles, the very things the city was bragging about, needed the room and the traffic signals.

The story has a coda the original builders never got to see. Flint put new “Vehicle City” arches back over Saginaw Street, lit replicas that arc above the brick pavement downtown and glow at night just like the first ones did. Stand under them and you’re standing under a hundred-and-twenty-year-old piece of civic swagger from a town that was famous for vehicles a full generation before anyone here had a car to drive.