page_title: Youngstown, Ohio
section_title: Pre-Black Monday
hierarchical_section_title: Youngstown, Ohio / Economy / Pre-Black Monday
caption_attribution_description: Description: Postcard of Youngstown Sheet &amp; Tube (early 20th century)
context_page_description: Youngstown is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio, and the county seat of Mahoning County. According to the 2010 United States Census, Youngstown had a city proper population of 66,982, making it the 9th largest city in Ohio. Youngstown is the mainstay of the Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA Metropolitan Statistical Area, with a population of 565,773; this makes it the 105th-largest metropolitan area in the United States, and the 7th-largest in Ohio.
  Youngstown is on the Mahoning River, approximately 65 miles southeast of Cleveland and 61 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Despite having its own media market, Youngstown is often included in commercial and cultural depictions of both Northeast Ohio as well as the Greater Pittsburgh Region due to these proximities. Youngstown is also the midway between New York City and Chicago, Illinois via Interstate 80.
  The city was named for John Young, an early settler from Whitestown, New York, who established the community's first sawmill and gristmill. Youngstown is a midwestern city, falling within a region of America often referred to as the Rust Belt.
context_section_description: Endowed with large deposits of coal and iron as well as "old growth" hardwood forests needed to produce charcoal, the Youngstown area developed a thriving steel industry, starting with the area's blast furnace in 1803 by James and Daniel Heaton. By the mid-19th century, Youngstown was the site of several iron industrial plants, and because of easy rail connections to adjacent states, the iron industry continued to expand in the 1890s despite the depletion of local natural resources. At the turn of the 20th century, local industrialists began to convert to steel manufacturing, amid a wave of industrial consolidations that placed much of the Mahoning Valley's industry in the hands of national corporations.
  In the late 1930s, the community's steel sector again gained national attention when Youngstown became a site of the so-called "Little Steel Strike", an effort by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, a precursor to United Steelworkers, to secure contract agreements with smaller steel companies. On June 21, 1937, strike-related violence in Youngstown resulted in two deaths and 42 injuries. Despite the violence, historian William Lawson observed that the strike transformed industrial unions from "basically local and ineffective organizations into all-encompassing, nationwide collective bargaining representatives of American workers".
  Between the 1920s and 1960s, the city was known as an important industrial hub that featured the massive furnaces and foundries of such companies as Republic Steel and U.S. Steel. At the same time, Youngstown never became economically diversified, as did larger industrial cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, Akron, or Cleveland. Hence, when economic changes forced the closure of plants throughout the 1970s, the city was left with few substantial economic alternatives. The September 19, 1977, announcement of the closure of a large portion of Youngstown Sheet and Tube, an event still referred to as "Black Monday", is widely regarded as the death knell of the old area steel industry in Youngstown. In the wake of the steel plant shutdowns, the community lost an estimated 40,000 manufacturing jobs, 400 satellite businesses, $414 million in personal income, and from 33 to 75 percent of the school tax revenues. The Youngstown area has yet to fully recover from the loss of jobs in the steel sector.
caption: Youngstown Sheet & Tube and Viaduct
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