STRUTHERS, Ohio – Mayor Catherine Cercone Miller admitted she likely will be crying as she watches the McKinney Building come down.
The Mahoning County Land Bank, which is working with the city to demolish the building, went out for bid Thursday for demotion of the South Bridge Street structure, which previously housed a Los Gallos restaurant that closed more than a decade ago.
The building sat empty for several years before the city purchased it from the land bank and attempted to market it, Miller said. During her term as mayor, she said the city has taken more than 40 different investors through the property, including prospects from Texas and California but no one “figured out how to make anything work in that building,” she said.
“Struthers did make a Herculean effort to try to revive this building for commercial purposes,” Deb Flora, Mahoning County Land Bank executive director, said. “But it just hasn’t panned out that way.”
During that time, the two-story building, which was constructed in 1900, also has continued to decay. The city has an engineer’s report indicating that the building’s foundation is twisting and the building’s back wall is falling, Miller said.
The last time she went into the building was when she took a group of women from Loop Youngstown into the property and took them into the basement. When the safety service director turned the electricity on, the whole back wall of the basement went up in flames.
“It’s not where we want to be with the building, but it is reality, and we cannot continue to let the building sit there and rot,” Miller said. “It’ll only make it worse, and we have to kind of move forward.”
Once the building is demolished, the city plans to coat the surface with gravel temporarily until a stormwater project is completed underneath the site, she said. Once it is done, the city will install a more permanent parking lot on the site.
She acknowledged she is no fan of paving paradise to put up a parking lot, as the familiar song lyric goes, but she asserts her downtown will be better served by that than the decaying structure.
“I believe this is going to be the only public parking that we have in downtown,” she said. Lack of parking has been a longtime complaint of downtown business owners and several building rehabilitation projects are under way there. ECMSI, located next to the buildings and one of the city’s largest employers, wants to expand but already has trouble accommodating its existing workforce with parking.
“We just have a lot of goals in the next three years to double in size,” Ralph Blanco, ECMSI’s CEO, said. “We’re aggressively marketing and going after different areas — Cleveland, North Canton, Pittsburgh — so we anticipate significant amount of growth.” He also is confident the new parking will be a benefit to the entire community, not just his business.
Miller also reported that Brian Palumbo, owner of Selah Restaurant and owner of other properties, has purchased another building adjacent to McKinney and one on the other side of the alley near the restaurant.
“The impact of parking in downtown Struthers will be significant,” Flora affirmed.
Plans for the downtown also include creating spaces for a small pocket park and mini flea or farmers markets, Miller said.
Upcoming infrastructure projects in the downtown include safety improvements funded by the Ohio Department of Transportation and repaving Bob Cene Way, leading to the city’s riverfront project, which will include a kayak launch, pavilion and small play area.
“Our goal is to uncover that river and make that part of the focus, if not the entire focus, of the downtown, to draw people here,” she said. The traffic count through downtown is “insane,” but motorists are not getting out of their cars, “so we want to give them a reason to walk around and to go from space to place to place.”
The contact for the demolition will include a provision to preserve the eagle statue at the top of the building, which will be incorporated into whatever wall or barrier is erected at street level, Miller said. The city also is requesting the section of the top of the building that has “McKinney,” if possible, to pay homage to its history. If not, it will be recreated in whatever barrier is installed for the parking lot.