Built in 1910, mortuary was once a staple of the community
By Scott Atkinson
MLive.com
FLINT, Mich. (AP) — The first night Andrew Perkins spent in Flint was on the second floor of a Carriage Town house that hadn’t had running water or electricity for about 15 years.
The room down the hall had no floor, which when completely removed made the downstairs area more spacious, if you could ignore spongy rotting floors and the sunlight shining through the walls. It’s the same area of the home where homeless people are known to gather and where Perkins’s power tools would be stolen some days later.
Now Perkins and his partner-in-architecture Mathieu Bain are planning to rehab the former mortuary into a piece of art as well as a space for artists.
“It’s daunting, that’s for sure,” he said of the work it will take to fix up the home, formerly Spencer Mortuary, built in 1910 and once a staple of the community.
They have yet to secure any funding, but that’s never stopped them before. In fact, most of the materials they’re looking for can’t be found in a store anyway.
They plan to rebuild the house using mostly salvaged material, gathered from wherever they can get it — whether that’s a neighbor’s garbage can or another house about to be demolished.
Walking through the house, the duo point out where they hope to build apartments in the upstairs of the home, which they estimate to be larger than 3,000 square feet. Those apartments could house future visiting artists brought in by the Flint Public Art Project, which is leasing the home from the Carriage Town Historical Neighborhood Association for one dollar a year.
They envision the downstairs and basement as a place for artists to work, teach and attend workshops.
Daunting might be an understatement for the work ahead. Aside from the work to be done on the house, it sits in an area plagued by crime and blight — and sometimes their work slides backward, like when Perkins had his power tools stolen.
“I thought two locks would keep them out,” he said, although he didn’t look concerned.
After all, he and Bain have done this before.
Perkins and Bain, both 24, were finishing up their degrees at the University of Buffalo when they were looking for a thesis project. While their classmates were working on “splashy, fancy design for the top few percent,” as Perkins put it, they wanted to do something different.
“We saw that there were a lot of homeless people (in Buffalo) and we thought, why are there so many homeless people if there’s so much housing, a lot of which is in OK shape? So we set out to reclaim one of these houses,” Perkins said. “It was basically against everything our colleagues were doing.”
They bought a house for $800 with no electricity, heat or water, and began renovating it — using only discarded materials to get the job done.
“We just started to tackle those things, doing the best we could with what we could find,” Perkins said.
One exterior wall of the now rebuilt home, for example, is now entirely made of old storm windows they took from other nearby abandoned homes.
Aside from employing the trash-to-treasure technique, Spencer and Bain also went into other abandoned homes for more practical supplies.
“We would target homes that were very soon to be demolished. So it would be like, the demolition crew is setting up, and we’d go in the night before and pull up the floorboards, pull off the drywall, and take it back to our house,” Bain said.
Their efforts in Buffalo caught the attention of Stephen Zacks, organizer of the Flint Public Art Project, who splits his time between New York and his hometown of Flint.
He was on the university’s committee that looked over Bain’s and Perkins’s project and later contacted them to see if they might want to bring their skills and ambition to the Vehicle City.
In Flint, Perkins said they plan on “doing it with a little more permission,” but the concept of fixing up the house with minimal budget will remain the same.
Spencer Mortuary closed in 1997, and was owned by J. Merrill Spencer, a well-known civil rights activist who was also a Flint Board of Education Member, Genesee County Supervisor and college classmate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., according to Flint Journal files.
In 2011, people in the neighborhood told the Flint Journal they were worried the historic home would be unexpectedly razed, as they had seen happen to another 1910 home on Second Avenue.
Rob McCullough, vice president of the Carriage Town Historic Neighborhood Association, said he’s “really excited” about the former neighborhood funeral home might get a second chance.
“If we’re going to stem all of the problems we’re having in the neighborhood with crime and activities, whether it’s drugs or prostitution — and it’s come a long way from the past till now — one way to have those things move to another area or leave this area is to have more activity that’s good,” he said. “This is unmarked territory right now. ... So people can come in and do what they want. All of a sudden we’re marking off territory. This territory belong to the community and we can reclaim this space for good.”
While they aren’t planning on having as an extreme living experience as they did in Buffalo--they lived as homeless people for about six weeks to associate themselves more with the city and a sense of need, they said — they will be living down the street from the old mortuary.
While the driving idea is to rehab the home with salvaged materials, they’re going to need some money. The foundation of the house has crumbled in the back, with dirt and grass falling through to the basement, and the house needs a new roof — neither are cheap fixes.
The project is currently competing in a grant contest through Chase Bank to secure some funding. Zacks said he’s optimistic the community will support the effort.
“It’s just an ongoing troubled point in the area,” he said. “So many other things are going well in the neighborhood.”
In the meantime, Zacks said the house is a popular spot for crime in the area. Bain and Perkins back up that claim. Aside from having their power tools stolen, they said there are are often people on the porch when they arrive in the morning, sometimes asking if they can have the old insulator pipes sticking out of the joists, which can be used for crack pipes. Both said they’ve been approached by prostitutes.
Other people, Perkins said, come regularly asking for work.
“And we say, ‘Sorry, we can’t pay you,’” Perkins said.
While they’re just getting started, they’re hoping their efforts in Flint will have the same happy ending they did in Buffalo, when a local person bought the home to finish some of the remaining renovations and live in it.
“That’s the story of that house. It was on the demolition list and then kind of by us going into this deprived, below-the-state-of-society lifestyle, we were able to bring the house to the point where someone could see the potential in it to work to bring it up to be a productive part of the housing stock.”
The high point of their Buffalo experience, however, was Thanksgiving, they said, when they had about 40 people over for a candle-lit turkey dinner, which they cooked in a wood-burning stove.
“It was actually a blast,” Perkins said. “And a lot of our neighbors started to recognize us as a presence. Finally. Which I think is good, because here we are taking this house that’s been abandoned for years and making it a part of the community.”
