FALL RIVER — Once considered Fall River’s second downtown, with bustling long strip of Pleasant Street with shops and restaurants, the Flint neighborhood has certainly seen better days. 

But now with the help of an infusion of $1.66 million in federal funding, there is an effort to revitalize the Flint neighborhood into a walkable economic engine for the city with the city’s planned streetscape project. 

On Tuesday, Congressman Jake Auchincloss, one of the area’s federal delegates who secured the funding, visited the Flint with other elected officials to take a look at the Flint’s “before” picture. 

Speaking to a crowd inside Gilbert’s Jewelers, a business that is participating in the Community Development Agency’s storefront improvement project in the Flint, Auchincloss said the post-war way of handling infrastructure, that was entirely predicated on the car, has over time “hollowed out our downtowns to make way for the automobile."

Read more from Jo C. Goode at heraldnews.com.