After fire, North Side couple rebuilds dream home, stays in city

New Old House

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By KATIE SEMINARA

YOUNGSTOWN — Though Jay and Kim Rupe passed out Halloween candy from their apartment on Tod Lane, the couple should be hanging up Christmas lights on their house a few blocks away.

For more than a year, holidays have been celebrated in their cramped apartment, rather than in the Rupes’ 1926 Dutch Colonial retreat.

After just one month of living in their home, flames ravaged the second floor, leaving the Rupes to decide whether to tear down their house or salvage the extensively damaged remains.

“There’s really no words to describe how we felt. We were overwhelmed by seeing the house and overwhelmed with the choice,” Kim Rupe said.

“It was extremely difficult, because this is our first [purchased] home together,” she said of deciding the next step.

The Rupes chose to stay, to rebuild the house they had handpicked to be their own.

Both Jay and Kim Rupe grew up in the Youngstown area, he on the West Side and South Side and she in Niles.

For 12 years, the couple moved from Las Vegas to Chicago to Harrisburg, pursuing education and following job offers. In 2004, the couple decided to take jobs that would bring them back to Youngstown, closer to family and the memories of childhood.

Jay Rupe teaches engineering classes at Trumbull Career and Technical Center, and Kim Rupe is an educational assistant with the Youngstown city schools.

“Youngstown is a central location,” said Jay Rupe, adding that it’s a quick trip to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Akron and Columbus.

But the Rupes needed one more thing to make Youngstown complete — an old house on the North Side.

The North Side search lasted two years before the Rupes found their house on Tod. It had red oak floors, built-in shelving with bay window seating, black-and-white checkered bathroom tile, Colonial fireplaces, and a mahogany staircase and banister. The Rupes were smitten with the 82-year-old treasure.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Lamb family lived in the house, said Kim Rupe. The Arms Family Museum helped the Rupes discover the history of the house, and the information showed that Mr. Lamb was a contractor who worked on the North Side.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.