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16.43-mile I-680 took 16 years to complete
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
milliken@vindy.com
YOUNGSTOWN
Document
Forty years after its completion, Interstate 680 continues to benefit the Mahoning Valley by providing convenient access to its major institutions and attractions, according to local transportation and urban-development planners.
“It actually gives downtown and the central city of Youngstown some advantages in terms of being on a direct route between Pittsburgh and Cleveland,” said Hunter Morrison, a senior fellow in urban studies at Cleveland State University.
“It’s an easy way into the city from those locations,” said Morrison, who lives in Youngstown and is a former director of campus planning and community partnerships at Youngstown State University.
I-680 is an asset because it provides direct access to Market Street and South Avenue and easy access to YSU and St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, he said.
In contrast, he said, attractions in Warren are harder to access because they’re farther from freeways.
“Ability to live and work in many of the suburbs here and travel around the region is probably a good thing,” which is facilitated by the presence of Interstate 680, he added.
“For any city to grow and survive, you need interstate access, and I believe that the benefits of 680 have provided that,” said Jim Kinnick, executive director of the Eastgate Regional Council of Governments, the Youngstown-based metropolitan planning agency.
“If you don’t have that interstate, you won’t get the services; you won’t get the business in. For the economic vitality of the area, you need an interstate,” said Kinnick, who previously was planning and engineering administrator for the Ohio Department of Transportation’s Akron-based District 4.
“It’s absolutely an asset because your transportation system is your economic development,” Ken Sympson, Eastgate’s director of transportation, said of the highway, which cost $70.1 million to build.
“Any business, anyone that wants to locate somewhere, wants a transportation system that they can get to and from places quickly and economically,” he added.
Genesis of Interstate 680
The genesis of I-680 dates back to 1946, when engineers told city officials that expressways were needed to relieve traffic congestion on city streets at a time when about 70,000 cars a day converged on downtown Youngstown.
In 1952, engineers showed city officials blueprints of a proposed arterial highway system.
The 16.43-mile I-680 connects with Interstate 80 and state Route 11 at its northern end and with the Ohio Turnpike at its southern end.
Entirely within Mahoning County, I-680 passes through Austintown, Youngstown, Boardman and Beaver Township.
Its construction was a 16-year project that began with a groundbreaking ceremony in September 1960 near Marshall Street and Glenwood Avenue for the first phase, known as the Mahoning-Market Expressway, and ended with completion of the southern end of the highway in 1976.
“There’s a lot to it – the design and the property acquisition,” said Myron Mondora, a retired Ohio Department of Transportation project engineer, explaining the project’s long duration.
Mondora, of Canfield, worked on the Delason Avenue to Midlothian Boulevard section of the road in the early- to mid-1970s.
Former state Sen. Harry Meshel of Youngstown attributed the delay in part to the project’s being far from Columbus and therefore not getting top priority from state officials.
CONSTRUCTION DISRUPTION
The construction caused the displacement of more than 800 families between Belle Vista and Poland avenues, whose homes were demolished to make way for the new road; demolition of three churches in its path; disruption of parks along the route; and monthslong closures of Glenwood Avenue, Market Street and the Mahoning Avenue bridge.
South Avenue, however, never had to close because traffic was maintained on a temporary road that bypassed the construction of the South Avenue bridge over the highway, Mondora said.
“The main challenge was to go through the busiest and most heavily populated sections of town and move out streets and homes” that had stood for 50 to 100 years, said Meshel, who was an executive assistant and urban-renewal director for the city during the 1960s under Mayor Anthony Flask.
“It was not easy to do that. You were disgorging families and tearing down homes,” Meshel said. “You succumb to it, obviously, because it’s supposed to be progress. It’s good to get a good road through your town and around your town, and it has served very well,” providing rapid access to the city, especially from Poland.
“They basically went through residential areas and cut through. We don’t do that today” in highway planning, Sympson said of the routing of I-680.
“There was a lot of public support back in that day for freeways generally, and there was a lack of any appreciation of what it [freeway construction] meant to the communities,” Morrison said.
Youngstown was characterized by “the compactness of the neighborhoods and the ability then to relate to one another, so we became one big family in most neighborhoods,” Meshel said.
Jack Sulligan, Mahoning County Democratic Party chairman at the time, worried that displacement of homes would reduce the number of Democrats on the city’s West Side, recalled Meshel, who became a state senator in 1971.
Although the highway expedites trips into and through Youngstown, driving on I-680, as opposed to city streets, has made many outsiders oblivious to the plight of city neighborhoods and “immune to the need to do something about it,” Meshel said.
“If the people from Poland and Boardman and the other places had to drive through the city to get where they wanted to go, you’d be cleaning up those streets in a minute,” he added.
NEW CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES
Using a technique that was new at the time, rust-resistant, epoxy-coated reinforcing bars were used to build the South Avenue bridge’s concrete deck, recalled Mondora, who retired from ODOT in 2000.
The I-680 construction also was among the earliest continuous reinforced concrete-pavement projects, with the concrete road poured atop an asphalt base, rather than a crushed stone base, he added.
The difficulties in building I-680 included correcting a construction error and the need to compensate for park and neighborhood disruption.
A construction error resulted in the need to raise the Market Street bridge over Interstate 680 by 13.5 inches using 36 hydraulic jacks in August 1962 to provide the necessary clearance over the expressway.
In October 1962, the state agreed to pay Mill Creek Park $55,000 for the land it took to put the freeway through that park.
In a later phase of the project, the city’s park and recreation commission ordered an appraisal in September 1970 of Pine Hollow Park and Ipe Field land to be acquired for the section of the freeway then known as the Boardman Expressway.
To overcome the neighborhood barrier imposed by the portion of the freeway then known as the Wickliffe Expressway, the Elberen Street footbridge was opened in January 1969, primarily to accommodate children walking to Stambaugh School.
One construction worker died and seven were hospitalized, one in critical condition, in a December 1972 explosion and fire at the Shirley Road overpass of what was then known as the Boardman Expressway, when a bulldozer ruptured a 12-inch natural-gas main.
CONSTRUCTION CHALLENGES
Mondora listed some of the challenges encountered in the construction:
Theft of construction materials, especially metal items, such as catch-basin gratings and chain-link fence.
Children crossing the job site during construction, out of the line of sight of heavy-equipment operators.
The need to blast away rock, especially between Shirley and Shady Run roads on the South Side.
Having to haul cleared trees and brush across Midlothian Boulevard to be burned in Boardman, where open burning was then allowed, because of the city’s open-burning ban.
The need to replace a 48-inch storm sewer on the steeply sloping Shady Run Road.
Having to close unexpected underground voids at abandoned coal-mine sites, including one at Midlothian Boulevard, and many south of Western Reserve Road.
The need to build a 40-foot earthen embankment to carry the highway over Pine Hollow, with a box culvert under it for stormwater drainage.
The first phase, known as the Mahoning-Market Expressway, opened in May 1963, with city council imposing a 50-mph speed limit on it.
In March 1964, city Engineer J. Phillip Richley, who later would become mayor, said the Wickliffe Expressway was necessary for the General Motors Lordstown Plant, which would open in 1966.
U.S. Rep. Michael Kirwan was present for the December 1967 opening of the Wickliffe Expressway.
In anticipation of completion of the Boardman Expressway, the township’s trustees approved plans in October 1967 for a large business complex at the interchange between the expressway and U.S. Route 224, which today is a major retail and restaurant center.
The portion of the Boardman Expressway between South Avenue and Midlothian Boulevard opened to traffic in October 1975 before the southernmost section opened, and the entire project was completed the following year.
Traffic volumes on I-680 range from a low of 4,870 vehicles a day at the Ohio Turnpike interchange to a high of 50,660 on Youngstown’s West Side, according the figures from 2014, the last year for which detailed reports have been published.
The speed limit is 65 mph in Austintown, drops to 50 in most of Youngstown, and rises to 60 on the city’s South Side and then to 65 in Boardman and Beaver townships.
crash statistics
Eastgate crash statistics show some of the most-hazardous sections of I-680 are in the portions that snake though Youngstown.
The most-hazardous section, shown in red on Eastgate’s map, is the portion between Market Street and South Avenue, where the speed limit is 50 mph.
In that 1.22-mile section, 101 crashes occurred in the three-year reporting period between Jan. 1, 2012, and Dec. 31, 2014, in which two people were killed and six were seriously injured.
Shortcomings of I-680 are the curved sections of road and the presence of numerous on and off ramps in Youngstown, Sympson said.
“What we get out there is people that are trying to go faster [than the speed limit] on the interstate, and that’s where you get your wrecks,” Kinnick said.
Mondora also said increased aggressive-driving behaviors in recent years have compounded the problem.
“They tailgate you. They don’t signal lane changes,” and they disregard workers in construction zones, he said of some motorists. “If they obeyed the speed limits and stayed in their lane, like they should, there’d be far fewer accidents,” he said.
The six-lane-wide section of the road he worked on was designed for a 70-mph speed limit, Mondora said. He added that the 70-mph signs, however, were removed before the road opened because federal and state standards at that time called for a 55-mph speed limit for energy conservation and safety reasons.
SPEED ENFORCEMENT
To crack down on speeding on I-680 and state Route 711, Youngstown police launched an enforcement effort in August 2015 that resulted in issuance of some 1,800 speeding tickets within its first three weeks.
“When you have interchanges on top of each other, the acceleration and deceleration ramps have to be lessened [in length], and that’s a challenge getting cars on and off the freeway without having accidents,” Kinnick said.
Mondora said, however, the ramps were needed to serve city streets at a time when the area’s steel “mills were booming” and the city’s population was more than double the current 65,000 residents.
Even though all of I-680 has been open for 40 years, connections to it are still a work in progress.
This year, the state Route 164 bridge over I-680 has been replaced with a wider bridge in the first phase of a multiyear $19 million project.
That project will include construction of a new interchange between state Route 164 and I-680, a nearby roundabout at state Routes 164 and 626, and replacement of the bridge carrying Route 164 over the Ohio Turnpike with a wider span.
In a separate $2.5 million project, the Vestal Road bridge over I-680 on Youngstown’s West Side is being replaced. The previous bridge closed in April, and the new bridge is scheduled to open in October.