Until about 2005, Youngstown was a hard sell to young creative types. Now, though, there is a small community of tech people who have come back to their hometown, to embrace the place as though it were the lost Holy Land. The group's guiding spirit is Tyler Clark, a 34-year-old musician and Web-strategy consultant who serves as YBI's "chief imagination officer," helping local businesses spruce up their websites. Clark grew up in Texas and went to Youngstown State University; as an undergrad, he was the musical director at the Youngstown Playhouse. He bounced around after graduation, living in suburban Virginia and Tucson, but then, in 2006, a good friend in Youngstown fell ill. Clark's wife, Jaci, a photographer who grew up here, came back, and the visit was a revelation. The Clarks bought a meticulously maintained five-bedroom Millionaire's Row manse, once the home of Sharon Steel president Henry Roemer, for $188,000.
Today, Clark works in a home office replete with a curving black and crimson art deco bar, and he regards Youngstown as an adventure. "We're urban pioneers," he told me. "We're trying to bring a city back from the dead, and Youngstown needs so much." Clark writes a blog, Youngstown Renaissance, that advocates for a livable Youngstown. ("For God's sake," he writes, "no more surface parking lots.") As a member of the group Resettle Youngstown, he takes care of vacant houses, boarding up the windows and doors to keep vandals out, and every so often, at the Lemon Grove Cafe, he emcees Thinkers and Drinkers, a casual powwow that sees locals sipping pints as they hash over questions like, How can we get Youngstown State students more involved in the community? When I went one night, he began with caution. "Complaining is OK," he said, "but I don't want this to turn into a bitch session."
The Lemon Grove is Youngstown's most progressive and outré venue, and among regulars, there is a feeling that the entrepreneurs at YBI are irrelevant -- alien to the Youngstown revolution and ensconced on their own little island of narcissism. At Thinkers and Drinkers, I met Howard Markert, 43, a small-scale green developer who had recently arrived, from the Bay Area, to convert apartments into eco-havens replete with nontoxic paint and energy-efficient furnaces. He told me that he felt obliged to be civically engaged: "If you're not," he said, "the neighborhoods will fall to pieces around you. Your investment will be worthless." Markert is active in nine Youngstown nonprofits. I asked him about YBI's entrepreneurs. "I never see those people," he said.
It was sad to see how far apart the techies and the activists are in a town that needs its visionaries to band together. At times, it seemed to me as though there were two separate Youngstown renaissances happening on the same street, and not in radio contact. It was as though the Garden Club schism was plaguing Youngstown all over again.
But then, on the day I was to leave town, there came hope for a bridge between the two worlds. John Slanina, the blogger, moved back to Youngstown. Revere Data, a San Francisco company specializing in investing software, was opening a 10-person office in the Youngstown Business Incubator. Slanina had taken a job as a senior analyst with Revere, and he came home brimming with schemes. "Maybe we ought to put a couch on the sidewalk outside the Business Incubator and offer passersby free milk shakes," he said. "Maybe we could open the windows and blast polka music. I'm going to start a Boomerang Initiative. I'm going to get together all the people who moved back here, so we can talk about our hometown -- and what we learned while we were away. I'll ask, Can we combine local trust with global knowledge to do good projects?"
Later, I talked to Tyler Clark, and he insisted that the answer is yes. "Youngstown is a laboratory," he said. "There's not a lot of restrictions and bureaucracy. You can make a difference without a lot of effort."
Clark paused, and then cracked out a screwdriver so that he and I could flagrantly violate the law. We were trespassing our way into an abandoned 10-bedroom Tudor mansion he was trying to keep standing, in hopes someone would buy it. The house had a sheet of plywood over the front door. It looked out onto grassy Wick Park. It was cold and musty inside, and Clark was dressed rather nattily for a burglar, in a long woolen overcoat, black pinstriped slacks, and a necktie. We walked up the stairs. The wallpaper was peeling and gathering into piles on the floor, amid a blizzard of old office papers. The bedroom floors were covered with an ugly yellow linoleum. Somehow, though, there was grandeur there under the surface, waiting for a makeover. Over the hearth was a white plaster mantel bursting with carved lions and cherubs.
Clark told me the story of the place. Until 2006, it was a home for the mentally disabled, but then the owner, facing financial trouble, walked away, abruptly, leaving the water service on, so the pipes burst. We strolled into another room, where there was an old piano and also a buckling floor. "A lot of houses in Youngstown should be torn down," Clark said, "but this one -- " He paused. "There's integrity that's lost the moment it hits the ground, and there's a gaping hole beside the park."
We went back downstairs and screwed the plywood back onto the door, to stave off vandals. Then Clark lingered awhile on the lawn, talking to a neighbor. "It's a beautiful house," he said.
"Yeah," said the neighbor, "it is. It'd be a shame to see it go."
Bill Donahue is a writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. His most recent story for Inc., about Dave's Killer Bread, appeared in the June 2009 issue.
