Although the point of a recent Flint City Bike Tours ride through Flint was focused specifically on some of the hundreds of Flint Public Art Project murals that adorn walls throughout the city, a piece of Flint’s history caused a momentary digression.
Two riders noticed a now-vacant storefront in Civic Park and began reminiscing about their weekly trips to Balkan Bakery, a northside staple that was in business for nearly 80 years.
“One thousand percent, the nostalgia factor in Flint is really intense,” said Emily Doerr, owner of Flint City Bike Tours. “It’s hard, because so much from the past is gone, but I love hearing when people recognize places they used to go and reminisce.”
That nostalgia is not uncommon, as riders often get excited to see old school buildings that are familiar or where some of the famous public swimming pools in Flint used to be located.
Doerr has run Flint City Bike Tours for six years. Each summer and into fall, several tours highlight portions of Flint history. Thomas Henthorn, a professor of History at University of Michigan-Flint, runs a popular tour called, “Ride the Redline,” which takes riders through several Flint neighborhoods and shares the history of housing discrimination in the city. Henthorn also leads a tour of Flint’s famous cemeteries, and there is also a popular tour of haunted sites in Flint based on the book, Haunted Flint, by authors Roxanne Rhoades and Joe Schipani. Cade Surface, an urban designer at the Crim Fitness Foundation, leads a tour focused on Flint’s many (MANY) parking lots, and how those spaces could be better utilized.
But there are also tours focused on the city’s present, too. Later this month, Doerr is leading a food and beverage tour that will have stops at some of Flint’s old and new favorite spots and hidden gems. And the mural tour introduces riders to large-scale artwork produced by local, national, and international artists that has become a popular attraction in the city in recent years.
Most of the tours have existed for many years, and Doerr says that it is always interesting how the interest level changes over time.
“Certain years, the red lining tour is more popular, but then the next year, it’s the cemetery tour, it just depends,” she said. “Like in 2022, Richard Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law (which chronicles government segregation and housing discrimination), came out and I think was a very popular book club read everywhere. And so all of a sudden, a lot more people were interested in redlining.”
Organizations also have partnered with Flint City Bike Tours for events for employees or patrons. The Ruth Mott Foundation coordinated a redlining tour for their staff, because that history is relevant to the foundation’s mission and work in north Flint. And the Gloria Coles Flint Public Library partnered with Doerr to offer the mural tour for free on August 16 for any patrons who wanted to learn more about the artists and some of the prominent work displayed in the city.
Stops in Carriage Town featured work by New Orleans artists Brent Houzenga, Courtney “Ceaux” Buckley, and Shasha Swan, as well as Flint-based artist Krystal Cooke. A stop on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue featured work by Kevin “Scraps” Burdick of Civil Rights-era icons and President Barack Obama. In Civic Park, near where Balkan Bakery was located, Doerr described Magda Love’s mural. Colorful, cartoony murals by Pauly Everett on the outside of Factory Two were highlighted, with tour concluding on a ride south of downtown on Saginaw Street, to look at Charlie Boike’s murals featuring legendary boxers Claressa Shields and Anthony Dirrell.
It had been several years since Doerr included a mural tour in her lineup, but she was pleased with the turnout of just under 20 participants. Several organizations do walking tours of murals near downtown, and the PixelStix app allows people to do their own customized mural tours around the city, so Doerr tried to include a few stops that people might not routinely access in those other ways.
“I don’t know how many people have ventured south of downtown to where Julie’s Pawn Shop (the location of the Shields and Dirrell murals) is located and spent time in the parking lot there,” she said. “But those murals are beautiful and I wanted to make sure to stop there.”
The fact that Flint Public Art Project is constantly adding new murals (several are planned for this year’s Free City Mural Festival August 29-September 8) offers the potential for new stops to explore on future tours, although the city’s landscape for bicyclists can often prove difficult for planning navigable routes.
“For example, I think the Eric Mays mural is beautiful and would frankly be very popular, but it would be hard to bike up to North Saginaw Street south of Carpenter to get there,” Doerr said, while still encouraging people to drive over and see the mural created by Cooke up close.
An added benefit of doing a bike tour with Doerr is her knowledge of the city from her career spent in urban planning and development. So, in between stops, riders often get to learn about new developments or projects, visions for the ample green space that now exists in portions of the city after blight elimination efforts, cool neighborhood anecdotes, and the case for expanding rather than shrinking the city through demolition.
“People sometimes say, ‘Well, this green space is nice,’” Doerr said. “And it’s like, no no guys, we need new development. We need rehab of the buildings that are still there. If it’s just grass now, I really try to give people a vision of what it could be.”
Flint City Bike Tours has several scheduled tours remaining this summer and into October, with booking information available on the website. They include a food and beverage tour, a parking lot tour, and Haunted Flint tours. Doerr, who also owns Queens’ Provisions in Carriage Town, is working to schedule one more Ride the Redline tour with Henthorn before the end of her season. She is also open to ideas that people have for new tour routes or topics.
“I think it would be cool to have some new tours, but haven’t figured out which ones yet,” she said. “If people have ideas for new tours I’m definitely open to them.”
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