Youngstown's Image

[Towntalk]

I was going through my files on Youngstown's history and noticed one prominant theme emerge from my vast collection of articles that date back to the town's founding, and that is that even as Youngstown was becoming one of the major players in the steel industry, we were also faced with a major image problem, that we could never shake.

While other Youngstown based newspapers were playing down our image problem, the Youngstown Vindicator was bringing them front and center.

In the early 1900's it was bemoaning the fact that the gambling interests ran City Hall, in another article all but one City Councilman was thrown out of office on corruption charges, in another, the paper bemoaned the fact that the downtown area was completely surrounded by gambling joints and houses of prostitution. Through the 1930's the East End was declared the "Tenderloin" and the "Grinder District" where crime reigned supreme.

Now I admit that as I built my library I made a point of making copies of these negative stories along with the "good news", but when it came time to file them away, the negative stories actually filled one drawer of a standard filing cabnet and all the articles came out of the local papers.

The point is that whenever these stories appeared, they were picked up by other Ohio newspapers and Youngstown's image was born.

How then, here in 2007 can we change our image when nothing really has changed?

Back in the early 1900's there was a drug problem that was so bad that by 1912 there was actually a hospital established near the Square to treat drug addicts.

Today drug abuse is the leading cause for crime in Youngstown.

I'm really interested in hearing your views on what you would do to change the perception of outsiders toward our city.