YOUNGSTOWN With 'Postcards,' take a vintage look at city

The captions under the postcards offer several bits of information.
By THERESA M. HEGEL
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
"Youngstown: Postcards from the Steel City," by Donna M. DeBlasio (Arcadia, $19.99)
You can't send the postcards that constitute Donna M. DeBlasio's new book, "Youngstown: Postcards from the Steel City," but they just might send you on a journey through the city's past.
The book is part of Arcadia's Postcard History Series.
In her introduction, DeBlasio states that "the vintage postcards provide a graphic representation of Youngstown's seemingly overnight transformation from provincial village to industrial metropolis."
She notes that the images portray the "vibrancy and excitement" of a developing community. What the idyllic landscapes and impressive structures shown on the postcards omit, she adds, are the problems, such as lack of housing and racial tensions, that arose from this very growth and development.
The book is broken into six chapters that focus on Youngstown's downtown, its public and commercial buildings, its sacred sites and monuments, its transportation and industrial structures, its hotels and restaurants, the Mahoning River and Mill Creek park and Idora Park.
Specific ones
There are postcards of the city's Civil War monument, the Home Savings and Loans building, the Market Street Viaduct, Lanterman's Mill and many other noteworthy structures.
Perhaps the only problem with DeBlasio's selections are their tendency toward redundancy. In some cases, she includes five or six views of the same site, each postcard varying only slightly from its neighbors. The captions of the repeat images do, however, give the reader additional nuggets of information.
DeBlasio's book is a valuable resource, a somewhat nostalgic preservation of Youngstown's visual history. The postcards featured in the book are all the more poignant because many of them depict buildings and sites that either have drastically changed over the years or are no longer in existence.
The captions DeBlasio includes do more than merely identify the postcards in question; they also provide a historical context for the images, grounding them in the timeline of Youngstown's development.
DeBlasio is an assistant professor of history at Youngstown State University and specializes in the social history of 20th-century America. She is also the director of the Center for Historic Preservation at YSU.
hegel@vindy.com