This is part 2 of a Flint Journal article on Tent City, where a close-knit group of homeless men lived hidden by unlikely urban woods. The men who lived there left this month on orders of the property owners and the city of Burton.





BURTON, Michigan

— After searching several weeks for the long-rumored Tent City, The Flint Journal found the site and visited several times over the course of a month before officials shut it down.

We found a small group of men who coped with life using bushcraft, perseverance, humor and beer:

A parking lot down South Saginaw Street from Fisher Body Plant No. 1, site of the 1936-37 Sit-Down Strike, once brimmed with freshly built vehicles, destined for dealerships around the country.

That was decades ago.

Now it’s filled with trees.

As Tent City, the site was decorated with clothes hanging from trees above crates and plastic chairs surrounding a fire pit and grate where the men sometimes roasted hot dogs.

Tarps, blankets, cushions and beer cans lay on the ground.

The bathroom was a toilet seat sitting on top of a soiled, bottomless crate a few yards away.

The pathway to Tent City ran through an inconspicuous hole cut into a fence.

“I choose to be here," said David “Red” Pattinson, 52, a leader among the group.

"This is our home. We’re family here,”

There were no women in Tent City.

“That creates a problem, especially if everyone’s drinking,” said Gary Nagy. “So we just kind of made it a rule.”

“You can visit,” Pattinson said of female visitors. “But you ain’t staying.”

Nagy said he worked at the Fisher Body plant for several years before it closed in 1987, leading him to years of odd jobs and homelessness and eventually to making his home near his former work site.

“I didn’t have the seniority to move to Buick,” said Nagy, who, with a long white beard, looks older than his 56 years. “So, this is where I’m at.

“And I wouldn’t trade it for anything. This is an experience. Nobody else can experience this.”

The men shared their space with rabbits and other wildlife, which they never hunted. A skunk roaming the campground was their pet.

“They’re my friends,” Pattinson said. “I had deer out here. I had a gray fox out here.”

The animals come and go as they please, and so did the men, Nagy said. That was the appeal of Tent City.

“Freedom,” Nagy said.

“If you want to sit down and have a beer, you can’t drink a beer when you’re at a shelter. ... Out of sight, out of mind is the way we look at it. We don’t bother nobody.”

This was one, but not the only, group of homeless people living outdoors in tents or other makeshift shelters, said Tom Knight, an outreach worker for Resource Genesee.

More to come:

Part 3: Flint tent-dwellers find refuge 'all over the city'



Part 4: They call it 'Beeralitis'



Part 5: Visit from officials marks beginning of the end

Part 6: Forced to leave, Tent City inhabitants go separate ways and vow to meet again

Previous segment:

Part 1: Tent City was real; Hidden sanctuary for Flint-area homeless was more than urban myth