Downtown Flint flips the script; Buildings built for newspapers, carriage companies and furriers get new life

[...]in November, a former Woolworth's department store on Saginaw Street that has been vacant for at least a decade will re-open as the Mott Community College Culinary Arts Institute after a $13 million renovation by Flint-based D.W. Lurvey Construction Co. The 36,000-square-foot facility will include two teaching kitchens, a bakery, a fine-dining space, a cafe and meeting space. "The current culinary school was too small to meet accreditation requirements," said Tim Herman, president of the Uptown Reinvestment Corp., a nonprofit economic development agency that spearheaded funding and whose partners include the C.S. Mott Foundation, the Ruth Mott Foundation and the Community Foundation of Flint.Because of restrictions tied to various tax credits, the building will be owned by the URC for seven years and then donated to the college.Across the parking lot, the Journal's once-state-of-the-art-printing plant, which had its ribbon cut to much fanfare in 2003, just ahead of the flight of classified advertising from print to the Internet and the collapse of daily journalism, is now the thriving Flint Farmers' Market (see related story, Page 12).