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Mayor McNally: It's up to city officials and the community to prioritize projects
YOUNGSTOWN
Local officials hope the future for the Youngstown State University-downtown Youngstown corridor, as envisioned by Kent State University architecture students, will inspire developers and owners to consider enhancements to their properties.
About 75 fourth-year architecture students put 150 of their ideas on display Wednesday at Trinity United Methodist Church on Front Street, home of the Lewis School for Gifted Learning Potential and C.S. Lewis Institute, in the city’s downtown.
The display board of pictures and drawings of what the students envision are the product of four months of work by the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, a part of Kent State University and its College of Architecture and Environmental Design.
Wednesday’s presentation was called “Re-Vision Youngstown,” the goal of which was to develop innovations to improve the city.
Mayor John A. McNally thanked the students for their work and said he was “amazed at some of the thoughts and ideas for open spaces and existing buildings that can be re-purposed.”
“What we are seeing are great ideas and concepts. These kids are professionals,” said Michael A. Hripko, associate vice president for research at YSU.
“We’ll look for ways to implement the projects,” he said.
McNally said Wednesday was the first time he had seen the finished products.
“I would like to see the students come back for more exploration of their ideas. I like that they took existing buildings and empty lots and came up with projects,” the mayor said.
The students presented a lot of great ideas, some more practical than others. Now, it is up to the city administration and council and the community to see what can be done, those in attendance said.
Among the KSU students is Charles Scarbrough of Howland, a 2001 graduate of Howland High School who has a finance degree from Baldwin-Wallace College.
He said his challenge was adaptive reuse of two adjacent buildings by tying them together in function as if they were one building, but leaving them looking the same on the outside.
Regarding tying YSU and the downtown more closely together, Mark Landis’ idea is for the university to take the first step and build an academic building down the hill closer to downtown. This would bring more students to the downtown as they’d already be attending class there.
At this point, said Landis, of Stow: “I feel if students had a reason to go downtown now, they would have done it already.”
In a survey of city residents, 90 percent of them complained there is no grocery store downtown, said Emily Appelbaum, of Rochester, N.Y.
As a consequence, her vision is an art and food market to draw people to the city’s center.
Hayden Erdman, of Girard, Pa., believes an under-utilized resource, which would complete the corridor from university to the Mahoning River, is to clean up and develop the area along the river.
This was a tremendous collaboration, said Hripko.
“We need investors to buy into some of these ideas and become part of the new Youngstown,” he said.