I Wish I Lived in Antrim Heights

September 24, 2014September 22, 2014 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

I wish I lived in Antrim Heights. There may be a property development somewhere in Michigan by that name according to my Google search but that’s not what I have in mind. What I have in mind doesn’t involve a move from the community I live in. It involves giving the community I live in a name.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that communities that have a name have an identity. In my city, areas like Clintonville, The Short North, The King-Lincoln district either have maintained, or used the development of an identity, to sustain or revitalize their communities as vibrant mixes of neighborhoods, businesses, and other institutions including schools and libraries. I’ve seen a similar thing as I’ve interacted with people from Youngstown in the series I’ve been doing on Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown. “Named” neighborhoods seem to be doing better than unnamed ones like the one I grew up in.

Far Northwest Columbus

The area I live in goes under the vague moniker of “far northwest Columbus”. But it struggles to have a real identity. You can live in this area and have a Dublin, Powell, Worthington or Columbus address. The area is served by two different school districts, both among our area’s best. Most of the homes, schools, and businesses were built around 25 to 30 years ago when Columbus expanded to the county line. Then, we were an “outer ring” suburb. Now, we are “inner ring” as development has continued into the county north of us. We have a growing immigrant population, as evidenced by the ethnic groceries in our area. The demographics of our area are changing.

Actually, I think this could make us a more interesting area if we had a clear sense of identity, not only in terms of a name but in terms of the kind of community we were becoming. It seems that this is a time where civic, school, church and business leaders could come together and create a clear sense of community identity as well as identify priorities for strengthening the community for the future. A few years ago, an ad hoc group came together to save a local wetland that a developer wanted to seize. But once they blocked this, the group dissipated. Yet the area still lacks for parks and recreation facilities and only concerted community leadership can address this. Traffic continues to worsen in our area which increasingly serves as a conduit to the suburbs to the north of us in another county. Road widening and sidewalks are desperately needed on the north-south road (Smoky Row Road) that carries much of this traffic.

I think it begins with a name. I choose the name Antrim Heights for two reasons. The Antrim family owned large tracts of land in this area. When we first moved here in 1990, my son could still see cows outside the window of his middle school that were part of their farm. The Heights part is based on the fact that most of this area lies in an elevated area between two rivers, the Olentangy and the Scioto. (I suppose you could call it Mesopotamia as well–the land between two rivers!).

I don’t know what the Antrim family would think of this. I hope they would be honored. What would be best though is if leaders in my community would actually recognize the need to develop something more substantive than “far northwest Columbus” for an identity and to think what kind of community we want this to become. While a name alone won’t do all that our area needs, it serves as a beginning, as a point of pride, a source of identity. I hope one day to live in Antrim Heights, or someplace equally illustrious–right where I am!

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Neighborhoods

September 20, 2014August 26, 2025 / rtrube54 / 43 Comments

Youngstown is a city of neighborhoods. I suppose that is true of most cities but until I began this series of posts I only had the vaguest notion of how true this was of Youngstown. I was always aware of the “sides” of town, having grown up on the West Side. Sometimes it seemed like traveling to any other side of town was like traveling to the other side of the world when we were growing up. That seems strange now that I live in a much larger city where the trip to the grocery store takes almost as long as it would to drive to another side of Youngstown. I know this because my wife grew up in Brownlee Woods and it took me 7 minutes to drive from my house on the West Side to hers (we both lived near I-680 so that helped).

Many of the neighborhood communities in Youngstown had a name, and the ones that did, at least in some cases, still maintain a certain sense of vitality. Brier Hill comes up again and again in my reading. A strong Italian-American community, common employment in the mills, great food, and St. Anthony’s church all seem to be defining qualities that brought this community together. They’ve even given their name to the iconic Youngstown pizza!

Rocky Ridge neighborhood

But there are many others as well: Brownlee Woods, Buckeye Plat, Lansingville, Crandall Park, Wick Park, Rocky Ridge, Kirkmere, Newport, Smoky Hollow, Fosterville, Idora and more. Some, like Buckeye Plat were established to provide housing for mill workers near the mills. Others, like Brownlee Woods and Kirkmere were post World War 2 developments with a much more mixed population.

What distinguished many of these communities and helped explain how they were worlds unto themselves was that churches, stores, restaurants, gas and auto repair shops, schools and libraries were all often within walking distance. That’s why going downtown or to the other side of town was such a big deal. Most of the time, you just didn’t need to leave your neighborhood to live your life, except to travel to work, if you lived further out. In the earlier days of the city’s development, workers walked to and from work in the mills and manufacturing plants. Most older homes had front porches and socializing at night with those walking through the neighborhood or those next door was common.

Neighborhoods are not only an important part of Youngstown’s past but seem to be an essential part of Youngstown’s future. Active neighborhood associations like the Idora Neighborhood Association are encouraging the renovation of homes, neighborhood block watches and moving into the city. The City of Youngstown is assisting these efforts through their Neighborhoods website.

If you are from Youngstown, where did you grow up? Did your community have a name? What were your favorite neighborhood memories?

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Part One

April 30, 2014December 7, 2014 / rtrube54 / 5 Comments

A while back I wrote a post titled “What’s Missing in the Diversity Discussion” and I observed that what we often don’t explore, although good work on this has been done, is the area of class differences. I mentioned growing up in working class Youngstown and being in a seminar where as a “get to know you” exercise, we could propose a question we’d like others to ask us about ourselves. Mine was, “I’d like to be asked what it was like growing up in working class Youngstown.”

In response to that blog, “Steve” actually asked that question. I don’t think I can answer that in a single post but I’d love to give it a start with this post.

The first thing I can say is that, far from being conscious of this being a struggle, my memory of growing up in my neighborhood is generally quite positive. Our home was located on the inner west side of Youngstown, roughly a mile or so from the Briar Hill steel mills. The men who worked in these mills could walk to and from work, and the community was laid out so that almost everything you really needed was within walking distance.

So one thing growing up was that this idea of being driven everywhere was foreign. I walked to school, to the post office, the “Pops” grocery for baseball trading cards, to the Dairy Queen, and Isaly’s for ice cream, to the bank to deposit my paper route earnings, to the library for books, and to Borts Field to go swimming, or meet up with friends for pick up games of baseball, basketball, and football.

What strikes me is that from a fairly early age (say by 8 or 10) I got used to doing much of this on my own, without parents hovering about. There were no parents arbitrating game quarrels. We worked things out, often with the “do over” rule. Yet they were still a significant part of our lives. All of us ate at home nearly every night at a certain time, and often that was between 4 and 6 pm, timed to the end of labor shifts.

I think what made this independence at an early age possible was the combination of this neighborhood web where if you really got out of line your parents heard about it, and those evening meals. It wasn’t perfect. Sometimes there were dinner table fights. But this sense of early independence combined with a community and family that really was in your life prepared us at an early age to assume our place in that community.

We didn’t know anything about extended adolescence. When you graduated from high school, you either started working (often in the mills or the Lordstown GM plant) or went to college — and often worked in the mills or elsewhere during the summer to pay for it. Many of our families wanted us to go to college, because work in many factories was hard, dangerous and wore you down physically. They were aware that education afforded the “opportunity for a better life”. Yet there was an ambiguity about this. Education meant becoming part of “management” which was always suspect, or one of those “pointy-headed intellectuals”.

Steve, that’s part one of an answer. Stay tuned for more.