YOUNGSTOWN East Side question... (Austintown, Hubbard: home, housing, hydrant)

[badguykc]

I'm into stuff like urban exploration and grit and the like... That said, the area on the east side of Youngstown around McGuffey Road that is mostly abandoned and overgrown... were any of those streets ever even developed before the steel mills closed, or are they just totally abandoned and everything demolished?

Weird question, I know, but on a recent trip to Youngstown I came across this area while headed toward Hubbard, and I was just curious.

[JR_C]

I don't really know the east side that well. But I do know that there were parts where infrastructure was built out--I think during the 50s--but no housing was ever built.


Here's an example: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1202...7i13312!8i6656


Is this the area you were in? Notice that there is a street light and a fire hydrant, even though there's almost nothing around.

[badguykc]

That was the general area I was in, yes. I turned off the main drags and even drove down a few of the side streets that I was able to drive on (some of the streets were either too overgrown, full of potholes and trash, or a combination of all of those and non-navigable), mainly on and around Jacobs Road.

I've been coming to Youngstown my entire life, I know the area really well, but for some reason I never really ventured out to the east side. My travels took me mainly to Austintown and the areas around Belmont Avenue. For whatever reason, I decided to take the long way home through Hubbard and on Route 7. That's when all of this caught my eye and I did a little impromptu exploring.

It really tells a sad story about Youngstown and the Rust Belt in general, of places and things that could have been. The vibe I get from many locals is that the east side basically doesn't exist (in comparison to other parts of the city), and evidently... parts of it literally never did.

[JR_C]

In 2000, the Vindicator published a book with their front pages from dates of significant events of the 20th century. While the main headlines were interesting, I was also interested in reading some of the smaller articles on those same front pages.


One of these articles, from sometime in the first half of the 1900s, was a blurb about how the east side was seeing so much less development than the rest of the city, and how it had traditionally been the least developed part of the city.