It was a story that repeated itself all over the rust belt, but Youngstown was particularly demoralized -- and fragmented. In his recent book, Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown, organizational theorist Sean Safford celebrates how Allentown, Pennsylvania, a similarly ravaged steel town, reinvented itself in the 1980s, as "community-based divisions" melted and city leaders formed a "bridge across ethnic, class, and indeed geographical divisions" to develop a new, diverse economy driven by tech start-ups. Youngstown, Safford writes, was "balkanized." Members of the Garden Club didn't talk to entrepreneurs. A few power brokers (namely, the Garden Club bunch) held the purse strings, marginalizing everyone else. The place was lorded over by the Mafia and often called Murdertown USA. And Jim Cossler felt the sting. In 2002, he told Safford that the city's mayor had never even set foot in YBI's office. "The community isn't behind the incubator," Cossler said, in a rare moment of moping. "We are the ones with the least community support."
Youngstown reserved its support, instead, for a onetime college football star who had apparent ties to the Mob. In 1980, Jim Traficant was elected sheriff of Mahoning County. Audiotapes nabbed him in clandestine chats with a Mafioso, who eventually handed him an envelope containing $163,000 in cash. Still, when Traficant was indicted in 1982, for accepting a bribe, he defended himself and opened, incredibly, by stating, "I fucked the Mob." His populist gusto sang to bitter, disenfranchised Youngstown, and after he wriggled free of conviction, he became a beloved U.S. representative, serving from 1985 to 2002, when he finally was caught and sent to federal prison for bribe taking.
In Traficant's heyday, Youngstown's urban core was practically gagged -- so moribund that the city's leaders seemed almost determined to suffocate enterprise there. In the '70s, they closed West Federal Street to cars and put in a brick terrace, thereby killing downtown.
Things got so dire that in 2005, the city's voters did a 180. They elected as mayor Jay Williams, a 34-year-old African American banker and political rookie who carried a vision to make Youngstown "healthy and leaner," largely by demolishing vacant houses and revitalizing downtown. Williams, who is still mayor, is now the rock star of the rust belt's burgeoning "shrinking city" movement. He appears frequently on national television and has been invited to the White House. He works in tandem with Tim Ryan, who is just 36.
And there is suddenly a host of young, civic-minded idealists in Youngstown, among them Phil Kidd, a bald and muscled onetime Army lieutenant. Kidd, who is 30, made his first foray into activism in 2005, by standing on a downtown plaza each week with a sign reading Defend Youngstown. Today, he works for a new nonprofit, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative. He has rallied Youngstowners to shut down a corner liquor store where criminals gathered and to help residents of battered neighborhoods get the city to pull down vacant buildings -- drug houses, usually, or vandal magnets.
Kidd often works 80 hours a week. He signs his e-mails Defend, PK, and he is intense even when he is just hanging out. One evening, he invited me to the Youngstown YMCA, where, he said, the city's young professionals gathered each week to play dodge ball. I expected a convivial gathering with, perhaps, a pitcher of iced tea on the sidelines. But no, the game was ugly. Kidd whaled the ball so hard that he grunted, and one of his targets grew so riled that postgame, he was spoiling for a fight. "Did you call me a faggot, No. 4?" he bellowed to Kidd's teammate.
"I was just sayin', " said No. 4, walking away.
Afterward, over beers, Kidd smirked, recalling the tension. "That's Youngstown!" he reveled. "That's Youngstown! What makes this place is its blue-collar ethic and its dysfunctionality. There are characters here." In time, Kidd told me about Paul Dunleavy, the dauntless co-owner of a local gym who runs through the streets shirtless, year round, while carrying a 55-pound log. "It's insane," he said. He paused, and then he grew confidential. "I've got my own log," he said, "back home, in my apartment."
But how do you build businesses in a city that revels in its dysfunctionality?
When Jim Cossler first came to his job, from Youngstown's chamber of commerce, the Business Incubator hosted just three start-ups -- a digital printing company, a manufacturer of wooden rocking horses, and an outfit that wanted to place printers for travelers' use at airport check-in areas. In 2002, the state legislature established funding for the development of technology businesses in Ohio, and Cossler had an insight that would help spawn Turning Technologies: "Software companies are easy to start. Pretty much all you need is a server and some computers. And if we have a bunch of tech companies here, we can build synergy."
That year, Turning began at the incubator. CEO Mike Broderick is still grateful for the jump-start Cossler gave him. "We probably got $250,000 or $300,000 worth of help from the incubator," Broderick says. "We didn't have to worry about infrastructure. We could focus on the product -- and that accelerated the process. Jim Cossler has a Rolodex of thousands of people, and he made introductions for us. We've been very cognizant of that."
