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Before the plows come
Editor’s note: I like to sneak around places I shouldn’t, especially old buildings. Here is one of my latest, yet unfortunately infrequent, adventures.
A few months ago, Sara the girlfriend and I ventured over to her grandma’s childhood home and neighborhood to take pictures before it is bulldozed by Youngstown 2010, the former steel giant’s 21st century urban renewal plan.
Her grandma grew up on the city’s east side, actually in the southeastern corner in a neighborhood called Campbell (but pronounced “Camel” — don’t ask.) For those of you unfamiliar with Y-town geography, the city itself stretches farther north/south than east/west along the Mahoning River. Her grandma’s house was maybe two blocks away from the steel mills, so it looked something like this …
… 60 or 70 years ago. Most days the pollution wasn’t too bad, but if the wind blew the wrong way, women had to run out and grab their laundry so their linens wouldn’t turn black.
I had not been to this side of town before. Apparently not many people have either since the collapse of big steel in the late 1970s.
Sara’s grandma’s old neighborhood, except for her house, was in pretty decent shape, all things considered. Some properties were better maintained than others, but I think most of the homes were passable. There are much worse neighborhoods in surrounding areas.
Here’s the outside of grandma’s old home. It sits atop a steep hill surrounded by unkept grass and wily bushes.
This is the view inside the front porch window. It’s hard to make out, but if you look below the graffiti on the right-hand side (“GD Folks”), you’ll see that the metal floor plates for the heater are missing, probably stolen by some scrap metal thieves.
A kitty by the stairs, near the front door.
I took other pictures in the house. They vary in quality. We ventured upstairs, but most of the doors were shut and we felt we should be cautious and not enter.
Up the street a block was her grandma’s grade school, now a church. Look at the brick at the top of the building on the left. That’s the color the bricks are supposed to look like.
The front of the building still has the school name – Haselton Saint Elizabeth Slovak School. The school’s address (Hazeltine Avenue) must have been some sort of variation or Americanization. This was, as the sign says, a Slovak neighborhood.
Down Hazeltine the other way is a Byzantine church. It’s in fantastic condition.
A block down from the Byzantine church on the corner of Wilson and Center is the location of her grandma’s dad’s (great grandfather) former beer garden/pool hall, established sometime in the 1930s. He had a furniture store but went bankrupt because he wouldn’t repossess his neighbor’s furniture during the Depression.
Earlier I mentioned that there were neighborhoods in far worse condition than Sara’s grandma’s. Here’s an example.
If you drive around downtown Youngstown and see very bright green grass where it seems like there shouldn’t be, that’s the work of the Youngstown 2010 program. In historical numbers, Youngstown peaked at a population of 170,000 in the 1930s. By 2006 it sat at around 81,500, less than half what it was in the 1960s.
A neighbor approached us as we left Sara’s grandma’s house. He asked if we were with the bank and if we were going to buy the old house. “Only take $30,000 to repair it,” he said. I laughed and said probably not.
The floors are in good shape. The foundation is solid. But that home, like most of the old steel town, will soon just be a memory.