Paramount Proponents Urge Use Beyond Parking
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Efforts to preserve the façade of the decaying Paramount Theater building appear to be over, but two proponents of the project say they don’t want the site to become solely dedicated to parking.
“If it’s going to be an open parking lot, it really ruins the streetscape,” said Anita Lin, who was part of the group that supported preserving the Paramount’s façade and redeveloping part of the site as a space for performing arts and public events.
The city has instructed its consultant to prepare specifications and bidding documents for the complete demolition of the former theater, said Charles Shasho, the city’s deputy director of public works. He expects the city to go out for bid on the work by late January.
Opening in 1918 as the Liberty Theater and reopening a decade later as the Paramount, the building has largely been unused since the 1970s and has gone through a series of owners before being acquired by the city in 2010.
The city received $803,490 from the Clean Ohio Revitalization Fund to demolish and remediate the building site but leaving the building’s façade standing. The intent was to restore the façade to serve as an amphitheater with a public space behind it for food markets and other events, with the remaining space being used for parking customers of the Youngstown Water Department. The city contracted with Strollo Architects, Youngstown, to develop a plan for preserving the building’s facade.
Initial studies of the property lacked detail and the city subsequently engaged a structural engineering firm, Atlantic Engineering Services, which has an office in Pittsburgh, to perform further analysis of the property. The firm estimated that preserving the façade would cost around $1.4 million. “Right now we have about $300,000 in the grant for the façade-saving, so we were left with a gap of around $1 million and we just don’t have the funding in place to attempt saving [the façade]", particularly with additional questions regarding whether the façade could be saved, Shasho said. “It’s kind of risky,” he remarked.
Efforts to raise funds to preserve the façade were hampered by timing, Lin said. The city informed the group just before Thanksgiving, after the cost assessment came back, that it had until Jan. 2 to come up with the additional funds.
“We called an emergency meeting right after Thanksgiving and sat down as a committee and decided to actively do some fund raising immediately” but the effort fell “way short” of what was needed, Lin said. That was due in part to the fact that many foundations that might have participated already have their funds committed this late in the year.
The group could have done fund raising prior to the assessment’s completion but decided not to in the event the assessment came in that the structure would crumble anyway. “We would have been putting the cart before the horse,” she remarked.
“I don’t want to put the city down. Their hands were tied,” Lin said.
She alled Mayor Charles Sammarone a “real cheerleader” for the project.
Phil Kidd, owner of the Youngstown Nation store and information center downtown, said he understands the city’s position. The Clean Ohio funds dictate a timeline and the city is looking at any fund-raising effort to be completed by early next month, plus there are the additional costs due to factors such as asbestos abatement. “But at the same time you’re losing a very significant piece of downtown’s history” as well as its’ “urban fabric on our main street,” he added. “That is a real loss not just for downtown but for Youngstown in general.”
While additional parking space was always part of the plan for the site, both Lin and Kidd say that should not be the sole use of the site, particularly the portion that fronts West Federal Street.
Such a plan is “not going to add to the integrity of the city or downtown,” Lin said. Hopefully there can be some kind of adaptation of the original plan for performing arts and event space, she said.
The frontage where the façade would have been “should not be designated in any way for parking,” Kidd agreed. He would like the Paramount façade group to stay together and continue its mission of trying to create a green space or sitting park with a historic marker acknowledging the theater. Having parking asphalt fronted all the way to West Federal “would not be good for downtown,” he said.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.