Lansingville, My Wife, and Me

Forty years ago this month my wife and I got engaged.  We were marrying young by today’s standards.  She was barely 20 and I was 21.  We met at Ohio State where we were both on blind dates with other people.  Back in the day, the dormitories were still sex segregated.  Guys were only allowed in the lobby of the women’s dorms.  Women had to be out of the guy’s dorms by midnight and the doors were locked.  There may have been rioting in the street, but Ohio State was still operating under 1940 rules.  The dorms still had maid service.  Can you imagine that today?

Tracey Winbush is a friend of mine, and this past week she asked me to be a guest on her radio talk show Tracey and Friends (WSOM AM600 M-F 12:00-3:00).  We were talking about fracking, and I learned that this fat white guy can talk for three hours about a subject I know nothing about.  That’s why I am a lawyer and in politics. 

At any rate, the studio is located on Simon Road off  Midlothian by Schwebel’s Bakery.  For my family, that is one of our “old” neighborhoods.  The area bounded by Poland Avenue, Indianola Avenue, Shirley Road, Midlothian Boulevard and South Avenue is known as Lansingville.  Local claims to fame when I was younger were Woodside Receiving Hospital, the beautiful old St. Matthias Church, and the “Shady Runs”: the Shady Run Pavilion, the long gone Shady Run pool, and Pemberton Park (the baseball field).  WYTV was also located in the vicinity.   If you lived in Lansingville you went to South High School in the 1930's and Wilson High School in the 1950's. 

My Dad's childhood home was on Union Street, off of Poland Avenue by the Center Street Bridge (old bridge pictured). Union Street was the heart of the original Lansingville plat.   Like many families, over the years my Dad's family moved "up" the hill but stayed in the same Lansingville neighborhood.  My aunt and uncle bought a house on Florida about two blocks from Shirely Road.  My other Aunt and Uncle bought the adjoining back to back  property on the next street over called Humbolt.  That is where I spent a lot of my time while growing up, and truth be told until my mid 30’s when my Aunt Josephine finally moved to Boardman to live with my cousin.  That was where I “felt” home. I proposed to my wife forty years ago this past Good Friday parked a few houses down from my Aunt Josephine’s house on Humbolt.

It has been a long time since I drove around the neighborhood, but I had some time before the program so I decided to do the memory lane thing and drove on streets named Powersdale, Caledonia and Zedeker. 

The Shady Run Pavilion has morphed into a legit banquet facility.  The Lansingville neighborhood had a reunion of sorts there about 20 years ago with an appearance by Lansingville’s favorite son…Congressman Jim Traficant.  WYTV moved its operations to the WKBN building on Midlothian, but its broadcast antennas have multiplied and are located at the old studio.  The pool is gone.  It appears the baseball park is under some degree of renovation.  The building that used to house what passed as a convenience store is still at corner of East Boston and Shady Run.  The store at the bottom of Humbolt is not.   Many of the houses are still neat and well kept characteristic of the predominance of families with Slavic ethnicity who lived there (how was that for politically correctness?).  But the neighborhood is in transition.

Long gone is the gothic St. Matthias Church, bulldozed to build the “artillery” highway as my aunt used to call I-680 which created a scar through the center of the neighborhood. It is now located on Shady Run.  In part of the frenzy to spend all of its tobacco settlement money, Ohio teamed up with the Youngstown City Schools to tear down down the classic, perfectly good, and irreplaceable Wilson High School…which along with schools like Warren Harding, and the more modern Volney Rogers Middle School, were scrapped and torn down to be replaced with…I don’t know what you call it.  What a waste.  What a shame.

Woodside Hospital is a gated, crumbling empty eyesore.  That is what should have been torn down, just sitting there filled with weeds and critters.  A little further down Indianola Rocco’s Shoe Repair and Margie’s Pizza are long, long gone.  Margie’s had the best pizza ever.  My cousin’s wife’s  family owned the business.  He still has the recipe.  I think he will take it to the grave!!!!

Up on South Avenue, my dentist’s office is long gone.  The package store is still there, but looks dangerous.  I believe the Evergreen and Coconut Grove bars are still operating, but the Coconut Grove has had some problems.  The Brown Derby Restaurant (the former Copacabana Night Club) is a shell.  We went there a lot.  Time passes.

We are still close friends with some folks I have known since I was small.  They lived next door to my Aunt, and “affectionately” called Lansingville “Little Malibu.”  They were making reference to the plethora of above ground swimming pools folks had installed on relatively small lots.  It had nothing at all to do with the two other prominent neighborhood architectural details:  blue yard globes and bathtub Virgin Mary’s.  Some of those houses actually had shrines that could attract tour busses!! 

I enjoyed my drive through the old neighborhood and spending some time waxing nostalgic.  It is the history of Youngstown families.  The first generation moved to homes along Poland Avenue and worked in the mills.  The second generation moved up the hill and educated the third generation, who moved out to Boardman, Canfield or Poland, or out of the area entirely.  That is my family history.

And that is where I proposed to my wife…forty years ago this past Good Friday.