Mark Knows It All

 If you are looking for a touchy feely kind of essay about the tearing down of the Paramount Theater downtown, go someplace else.  I can give you a list of sites bemoaning the “end of an era.”  At long last the single biggest eyesore remaining in downtown Youngstown is being torn down.  Not only was it decrepit ugly, it was unsafe and unsanitary.  I hated even walking by it. Don’t get me wrong.  I am an historic preservation type.  Originally built by locals as a vaudeville house in 1918, the then named Liberty Theater was purchased by Paramount Pictures in 1929 which installed state of the art “talky” equipment. Its single architectural feature was its ornate terra cotta façade, a hallmark of many downtown Youngstown buildings,  which was covered up by an appropriately garish marquee and verticle sign. At the end of the day, of all of the Youngstown downtown movie palaces built during the 1920’s and 30’s, the Paramount was the worst of the bunch.   In my lifetime it was always