Idora Park in Youngstown is gone, but even after 20 years, it lives on in the memories of those who saw it, including Vince Guerrieri
By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]
We glorify the past when the future dries up
--Bono, “God Part II”
Twenty years ago today, people visited Idora Park on the last day it was open.
I was one of them.
The park had already closed to the public after Labor Day, but I was there with the picnic for St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Mom was a nurse there. I had just started second grade at Kirkmere Elementary School.
That spring, I stood on the playground at Kirkmere and watched clouds of black smoke billow up over the treetops.
“What’s that,” I asked the monitor.
“Idora Park’s burning,” she told me.
The fire started in the Lost River, a dark ride dating back to the 1920s, and spread through the office, several concession stands and one end of the Wildcat, one of the park’s two roller coasters.
The amusement park was up for sale and on its last legs anyway. Someone once told me that at the end of its existence, unless there was a company picnic or something, you could shoot a cannon through the midway and not hit anyone.
But 20 years after the fire and closing, the park still holds a spot in the hearts of many current and former Youngstowners. There are probably more former than current Youngstowners. The population is almost half of what it was 50 years ago, and lots of people left town. The mills closed up shop in the late 1970s, as they did in many other cities in Northern Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But while some cities recovered, Youngstown didn’t. Idora Park is remembered fondly now because there’s little to look forward to in Youngstown.
The park was built in 1899 on the South Side at the end of a trolley line. A bridge spanning the Mahoning River at Market Street opened up the entire South Side for development. At that point, it was very common for amusement parks to sprout up at the end of trolley lines.
But as the car became the preferred mode of transportation, trolley lines died out, and so did many trolley parks. The only reason Idora held on was because it had become the preferred location for ethnic, church and company picnics.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, many of the other trolley parks that had hung on were starting to fade away, as their neighborhoods got sketchier. But until the mills closed, Youngstown had one of the highest rates of home ownership in the country.
Then the bottom dropped out on a day they call “Black Monday.” Youngstown Sheet and Tube, one of the largest employers in Mahoning County, announced the closure of one of its largest mills, in Campbell (a town named for a former president of Sheet and Tube). More than 5,000 people lost their jobs, and Idora Park was crippled. The Sheet and Tube picnic was the largest each year for the park.
By then, the park was a relic. It had taken rides from other parks that met their end in the 1960s, such as Euclid Beach in Cleveland and West View Park outside of Pittsburgh. People were starting to appreciate the park’s historic value, as well as its bitchin’ roller coasters.
But for many people, it was a place where they shared the memories that make them wealthy souls. For me, I can still remember as vividly as if it happened yesterday, riding the Lost River with my mother, Jessica Leach and her mother. She was the first girl I ever knew, and moved away shortly after Idora closed. I can recall arguing with my brother over who’d drive on the Hooterville Highway. (I was older…I did.)
Men met their wives, and the families they made went there. Children rode their first roller coasters at Idora Park. Matt Schwartz was one of them, riding the Jack Rabbit, which was the second oldest roller coaster in America when the park closed.
“Youngstowners miss Idora because it holds a special place in their heart,” said Schwartz, who founded a Web site, www.idorapark.org. “Most of us think of our younger years when we think of Idora Park. Many think of time spent with families. Youngstown still holds on to those memories and are proud of them.”
Since the park closed, there has always been a small but vocal movement to reopen the park. The Mt. Calvary Pentecostal Church bought the property, and planned to build a City of God on the site. They lost the church in 1989 after accumulating more than $500,000 in debt. A group of preservationists got Idora Park on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993 and put together a bid that year to buy the property and restore it, but at the eleventh hour, the church got the property back for one dollar and other considerations, namely a $300,000 mortgage.
For a time, there was a plan to move the roller coasters to Conneaut Lake Park in Pennsylvania, but that never came to pass. And now, any preservation movement is dead. Someone asked Max Rindin, one of the owners of the park, what would happen to it after it closed.
“In time,” he said. “It’ll all be torched.”
And bit by bit, his prophecy came true. In 1986, a fire burned down the beer garden and fun house. Last year, another fire claimed the ballroom, the park’s heart and soul, home to every act from Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra to K.C. and the Sunshine Band.
But until that fire, there was always a tangible reminder of Idora Park. Very little had been torn down before the ballroom fire, and people could sneak into the park and walk across the midway, by then with weeds poking through the concrete. One of my brother’s friends even snuck into the ballroom and played the piano there. With the park still in sight, it was still in many people’s minds, and two disc jockeys took advantage of that.
On April 1, 1994, WHOT-FM announced the opening of I-2, the second Idora Park. A.C. McCullogh and Kelly Stevens, the morning disc jockeys for HOT 101, said they were broadcasting live from the new amusement park, and you could hear roller coasters in the background. Many people, including at least one television station reporter, turned out at the site of the amusement park, only to find it still padlocked with no signs of the park opening. In the tradition of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, they had been fooled. But even 10 years after the park’s closing, there was still enough nostalgia to let people hold out hope that the park had reopened.
“Most people in this town would do just about anything to have that park back,” Schwartz said.
Since then, if not before, Youngstown’s fate was sealed. Although other cities had emerged from their post-industrial funk, Youngstown wasn’t that lucky. Today, it’s the eighth biggest city in Ohio, having been overtaken in the last census by Parma.
One by one, many of the mills and factories closed, taking a whole way of life with them. Schools closed. Hospitals closed. Shopping districts disappeared. Neighborhoods struggled to maintain their dignity as people kept moving out.
For Youngstown, with apologies to Carly Simon, these ain’t the good old days. And as long as the good old days are behind them, Idora Park will be remembered fondly until the last person who remembers it is gone. Then, and only then, will it be consigned to the dustbin of history.