RIP Youngstown, 35 years ago today

Was reading a Maurice Clarett article yesterday and stumbled across the story of Black Monday for the first time. I knew that Youngstown was an especially depressed shell, but didn't realize the whole thing essentially folded with four days notice.

http://www.vindy.com/news/2012/sep/19/gathering-to-remember-black-monday/?mobile

It seems like there are dozens of Youngstowns we never could fix, and that is the most underrated driver of our post-Vietnam history. Birmingham, where I live, is the only major metro in the South that is actually a Rust Belt town. They keep trying to make the inner core pretty with a big park here, a baseball stadium there. No one even bothers with a plan to come up with tens of thousands of jobs that disappeared with the USX Ensley Works, Sloss Furnace, the Pullman Car plant, etc.

I don't see how large swaths of America ever truly recover.

 

I always thought Springsteen got a bad rap for the Ghost of Tom Joad CD. (Good reviews but not such great sales.) No radio-ready or rock 'n roll, but if it came out today instead of the booming '90s I think it would resonate a lot more.

Youngstown and the book "Journey to Nowhere" were the whole inspiration.

 

And I think it will get worse. I beleive lots of service jobs are heading outside the country.

 

Birmingham... a Rust Belt city in the South.

I've said it since I moved here eight years ago -- it is Detroit, one-quarter size. From the corruption in city and county government, white flight, alienation of city and suburbs, perpetual debt, haves and have nots... everything but a good coney dog and deep-dish pizza.

 

And the added bonus of a combined city-county government.

 

It's actually a great hot dog town, just with its own style.

 

Birmingham is Birmingham. It's a good place. Unfortunately, like many other southern municipalities, it still suffers from its Jim Crow past in the view of many outsiders. I can think of many worst places to live than B-ham.

 

Canton, Akron, Cleveland, Elyria, Youngstown - nothing like an 'Information Economy' or 'Service Economy' arrived after the collapse of the 'Manufacturing Economy' to remake the middle class in these places. In some of these cities the unemployment rate for African-Americans exceeds 30%.

Reimagining these places - and hundreds of others like them - may be the most important domestic issue of the next quarter century.