Youngstown, A Once Great Town

When I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, back in the 50's and 60's, it was a thriving and bustling town. For a long period of time, Youngstown was the top steel producing city in the world. We saw movie stars in the restaurants and all the major politicians made it a point to spend some time in our little town. Along with all the prosperity came a lot of corruption and trouble but the town seemed to absorb it all and kept on growing and the money kept on flowing. The prevailing attitude was, "We have the steel companies right where we want them. We're too big for them to do anything about it!"

My uncle worked for one of the biggest plants in town. In 1963, he had 13 weeks vacation and another 6 weeks of sick leave. Everyone was working less and making a whole lot more than the rest of the nation. The steel plants ran for miles and miles along the Mahoning River which ran through the center of town. We had the largest railroad yard in the world right in the center of town. Everywhere you went, you saw smokestacks spewing smoke 24 hours a day, molten steel flowing from blast furnaces, cranes moving incredibly huge pots of raw materials, huge convoys of trucks and mile long trains bringing in raw materials and taking raw steel out with them all running 24 hours a day as well. We were invincible!

Until 1965.

The steel companies began looking for more economically favorable environments and, one by one, left the city, sometimes taking their entire plants with them.

By the time I graduated in 1970, it was almost all over. When I left town in 1973, there were abandoned building and homes everywhere.

As Kelly and I drove into town this afternoon, we cruised some of the familiar neighborhoods I grew up in:


This is the street I grew up on. There's only one house on it now but when I lived there, there were 5! Obviously, they were not very big. The first tree on the right was in front of our house. Most of the homes in our neighborhood were abandoned in the 70's and bulldozed in the 80's.


This is where the house my Mom and Dad lived in after I left town was. The nieghborhood, which adjoined ours and was directly across the street from a large steel factory, suffered a similar fate.


This is Madison Elementary School or, at least, what remains of it. I remember playing on the playground and walking down those hallways. Now it's just a big empty building.


This was once one of the largest railroad yards in the world (the largest was downtown). All you could see, for miles, were steel mills and smokestacks. There were over 20 sets of tracks running through this area which is about 30 miles long. There was a time when it was filled with trains delivering ore and taking steel with them when they left.

It's a sad tale but there is a lesson to be learned here. None of us are invincible. Not us, not our cities not even our nation:

For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think...Romans 12:3