Audioguides Youngstown

On September 19, 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the closure of its Campbell Works, eliminating 5,000 jobs in a single day. That date, known locally as Black Monday, set off a collapse that stripped the Mahoning Valley of roughly 50,000 steelmaking jobs over the following decade and left Youngstown as one of the most studied examples of deindustrialization in America. The mills along the river are largely gone now, some demolishing into vacant lots and some converted, and the city's population has fallen from a peak of 170,000 in 1930 to around 60,000 today. That contraction left behind a landscape of vacant land that urban planners and artists have been working with creatively rather than pretending it does not exist.

What remains is genuinely worth knowing.

The Butler Institute of American Art, founded in 1919, holds one of the finest collections of American painting in the country, including Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip and works by Hopper, Wyeth, and O'Keeffe, all free to visit. The National Road and the Mahoning River gave the region its 19th-century prosperity before steel arrived, and that earlier history is visible in the town of Canfield to the south and in the Western Reserve grid of streets and village greens that still structures much of northeast Ohio. Youngstown State University anchors the downtown with a student population that brings enough energy to keep the remaining restaurants and coffee shops viable.