How Youngstown's Steel Money Built a Street of Mansions and Then Bulldozed Them: Wick Avenue

Wick Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio was once a street of steel-baron mansions. Most of them are gone now, and the reason is stranger than a crash. In nineteen hundred, Youngstown Sheet and Tube was founded on the Mahoning River, and within twenty years it was the fifth-largest steelmaker in the United States. The men who ran it built their homes uphill on Wick Avenue, above the smoke of the mills that paid for them, and one of them left behind something no other steel town in America had. This is how that street rose and how it came down. It runs from the founding fortune and the Butler Institute of American Art, the first museum in the country built for American art, through Black Monday on the nineteenth of September nineteen seventy seven, the day the mills began to close and the Mahoning Valley started losing the jobs and the people it has never gotten back. We follow what happened to the mansions themselves, the ones the city took down and the ones the university took down, and the single building on the street that outlived all of them. If you have ever driven Wick Avenue past Youngstown State University and wondered what used to stand there, this is the history nobody puts on the plaques. WATCH NEXT → How Cleveland's Oil Money Built a Street of Mansions and Then Tore Them All Down:    • How Cleveland's Oil Money Built a Street o...   SUBSCRIBE →    / @ohiouncovered   Which Youngstown mansion would you have saved, if the choice had been yours? Tell me below. CHAPTERS: added after render (needs the finished video's timestamps) Historical and informational only. Locations are real; some footage is illustrative. #Youngstown #OhioHistory #RustBelt