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South Avenue business owners look to reform merchants’ association
YOUNGSTOWN
Businesses along South Avenue are looking to reform a merchants’ association with the hope of improving one of the city’s main corridors.
Fourteen business owners and officials, clergy members and retirees met Friday at the Metro Assembly of God with Councilman John R. Swierz, D-7th, Mayor John A. McNally and five members of the latter’s administration to discuss what can be done to improve the area.
The meeting was planned before a man was fatally shot Thursday evening in the parking lot of a bar on South Avenue.
“We’re trying to resurrect the old South Avenue Merchants’ Association,” Swierz said. “It will allow the businesses to be organized and be able to present concerns and issues to the administration as a group.”
The association was successful in the 1980s but has been dormant for years, he said.
B.J. Duckworth, manager of the Coca Cola Bottling Co.’s Youngstown plant on East Indianola Avenue, just off of South Avenue, said such a group is needed to “rejuvenate” the area.
“We know the power of businesses coming together to effect change,” he said. “We want to get this association up and running again.”
Reviving the group is “the first step in a process to unite the businesses together to show we support the area,” Duckworth added. “We’d be able to leverage resources and manpower for all the businesses to work together and be more successful.”
As part of this effort, businesses on South Avenue will have a “neighborhood clean sweep,” from noon to 2 p.m. Sept. 12.
Businesses on and around South Avenue are asked to sweep their sidewalks, clean their property and do the same on nearby vacant properties, Duckworth said.
“We need more people involved in the South Avenue corridor including the cleanup of vacant lots,” McNally said. “We want to have groups take ownership of city lots to maintain properties.”
A number of businesses on South Avenue, in particular restaurants, have closed in recent years. But a Captain Fish restaurant recently opened at the location of the former KFC on the street, and the former Dragon Palace may reopen, Swierz said.
“We want a clean, economically viable corridor,” he said.
Lynnise Wells, owner of Nana’s Nest, a child-care facility on South Avenue, said she supports the merchants’ association proposal.
“Teamwork makes a difference,” she said.
Wells added that she was interested in some of the grant programs offered by the city for exterior improvements and expansions to existing businesses.
“I plan to take advantage of what the city is offering,” she said.