When we first arrived in Youngstown, Greg drove us
around a little bit to get acclimated, so to speak, and then we went to the home
of our friends Kathy and Richard, where we’d be staying for two and a half
weeks. We hadn’t seen them since before Covid, and they were very welcoming, as
always. Their Mid-century Modern house contains a pleasing mixture of vintage
furniture and other cool items both old and new, including Kathy’s displayed
collections and a gallery-style art wall. They also have a big, well-tended
yard and a garden that they both work hard to maintain. The place seemed like an
elegant refuge after six days on the road.
Later, my brother came in from Chicago, and we all went
to a Festival of the Arts that featured local artists and was sponsored by the
university. At Bob Barko’s Steel Town Studios display, Kathy bought me a
digital print of “Those Were the Days… Smoky Hollow,” not because I had ever
really had anything to do with the historic neighborhood of that name, but
because I had recently been writing and talking about Youngstown’s past
(whether or not, as the theme song of All in the Family had it, those
really were the days). Barko’s painting clearly depicts an earlier time, and
there’s an ice wagon in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. But it's
the houses that are the focal point of the piece, and they’re painted in sunset
colors, which are reflected in the clouds. The sky also seems smudged by some
of the old steel town smoke and grit that was so common when the mills were
still operating, and which gave the neighborhood its name. The painting shows
lots of people out in the street, walking and interacting, and Barko manages to
evoke, as he does in most of his work, a sense of poignant longing for times
when Youngstown was a more prosperous place, a place where there was work to do
and people could afford to live decently.
In Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown, Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo say that Youngstown was called the City of Homes in a promotional brochure from the 1930s because at that time it had one of the highest homeownership rates in the country. (Linkon and Russon, pp. 72-73) That was because by then many workers earned a living wage, mainly because of their own hard-fought battles to improve their lot in the workplace. Earlier, the struggles over work issues and housing problems sometimes intertwined, as was the case in the 1916 strike in Campbell, a city that was then called East Youngstown. Workers from Youngstown Sheet and Tube went on strike there because they were angry about both their living conditions and working conditions. During the strike the workers burned the city to the ground, and afterward the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company built prefabricated concrete housing for its workers in an attempt to improve their living conditions. (Linkon and Russo, pp. 28-30) Though this workers’ housing estate had never been a utopian community – the housing was racially segregated and immigrants were kept apart from the native-born – I wanted to see it because I had been reading about renovation efforts there, so one day we all drove to Campbell. Most of the workers’ homes are still standing because they were made of durable materials, but after a hundred years and a lot of recent neglect, the ruination was striking to see -- walls were sagging, paint peeling, windows missing, and there was an occasional view into a crumbling interior. Most of the structures still seem reasonably sturdy and worthy of renovation, and a nonprofit group called Iron Soup Historical Preservation Company is working to fix up the houses and make them livable again. But after walking around this part of Campbell for a while, we could see that it’s still very much a work in progress.
Highsmith, C. M., photographer. (2016) Abandoned auto-repair garage, a casualty of the drastic downturn of the local steel industry in Youngstown, Ohio. United States Youngstown Mahoning County Ohio, 2016-10-06. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2016632269/.
Ever since deindustrialization began in the late
1970s, Youngstown has increasingly become a place, like so many others in the
Rust Belt, where decay and ruin are commonplace in neighborhoods that once were
solid and livable. In an essay called
"Map for a Forgotten Valley: Dispatches from Youngstown, Ohio (Issue 7, New Haven Review),"
Christopher Barzak wrote about what he fancifully called "feral houses." He contrasted
these with lived-in domesticated houses, and he said feral houses, "tend
to roam in bands when their neighborhoods have been lost, forsaken, and huddle
together in their emptiness." So many neighborhoods in Youngstown can still
be described as lost, with houses gone feral and people gone away as they
search for a better way of life somewhere else. I left Youngstown in 1979, at
the very beginning of deindustrialization, and I have returned on a regular
basis, each time seeing more empty lots where houses were razed and more houses
that were once homes but now are barely recognizable as structures at all.
Barzak also talks about the fact that some houses do need
to be torn down, but he says, "Each time a house is demolished, I am
watching someone's dream of a safe life for themselves and their families on
earth being destroyed…" I have had similar feelings of loss and distress about
neighborhoods I lived in back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the Youngstown
area. During drives around those neighborhoods, I looked with dismay at the
empty lot where my grandmother’s house once stood; at the overgrown weedy yard
that once supported a house where I had some intense experiences that I later described
in a short story about life in a mill town; and at other lost and
well-remembered places. But I do have to admit that I felt, more during this
visit than any other in recent years, that the destruction was beginning to ebb
a little, and I’m happy to say that some of the houses that I once lived in are
still standing and sometimes looking well cared for. I even think we found the
house where I lived until I was four years old – a two-story red brick house
with a big porch and a small yard near Lincoln Park. It made me feel strangely
hopeful to know that it was still there.
In fact, there are many beautiful and sturdy homes left in the city, prices are very low, and Youngstown still has a lot to offer. One evening we all watched an America ReFramed episode about Youngstown. It focused on the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that has been renovating houses in Youngstown, in addition to demolishing them when necessary, and on Julius T. Oliver, a Youngstown city councilman who speaks convincingly about the possibility of neighborhood renewal. The work they do is slow but meaningful. A few days later, on one of our drives around the city, we stopped in Smoky Hollow and saw that there’s some renovation going on there, too. There was even a Smoky Hollow Festival this year, which is an indication that the neighborhood may be able to thrive again and the homes there may all be as domesticated as they are in Bob Barko’s painting.
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