Veggie Bingo: Road trip edition, part 1

On Friday, August 7, my friend Irma and I loaded up a rented Mazda with cards, balls, and cage and hit the highway. Our destination: Youngstown, Ohio. Our mission: Veggie Bingo.

This adventure came about thanks to a probably unduplicable set of international coincidences, but the short version of the backstory is that our mutual friend Suzannah Tartan – born and raised in Youngstown, now a resident of Tokyo, and this summer on a barnstorming tour of the States — cooked up the whole thing as a way of both raising money for Y-Town community gardens and getting Irma and I to come visit her at her mom’s in Ohio.

Halfway between Chicago and New York City, Youngstown was, in its 20th-century heyday, a land of plenty — a booming steel town whose captains of industry built sprawling brick mansions in the hills of the Mahoning Valley. It’s also plenty diverse: in earlier parts of the last century jobs in the robust steel and coal industries drew thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy, and Greece, and sparked a steady influx of African-American families from the Jim Crow south.

But then, the bottom fell out of the steel industry. In 1977 Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly shut down, putting 5,000 people out of work in one day. Over the next few years, the rest of the mills closed, and the population took a dive, from a 1960s high of 165,000 to a current count of 80,000 or so. Today, boarded-up houses and weedy lots share blocks with once-grand Victorian homes and crumbling Gilded Age mansions. In August, the landscape is shockingly lush — as if the forces of urbanization have finally said “uncle” and ceded control of the terrain back to Mother Nature. A CNN Money article from 2008 — appropriately titled The Incredible Shrinking City — gives a snapshot of the city’s roller-coaster history, and hints at some of the innovative strategies for re-investment that, two years later, helped get Irma and I on the road.

Much as in Detroit, and other Rust Belt cities that never quite managed to diversify their economic base, Youngstown has a lot of vacant land. That sign up there? Here’s a closeup.

So, much as in Detroit, though perhaps not on such a sweeping scale, the city’s looking to urban agriculture — farming, beekeeping, orchards, community gardens — as a way to repurpose all that empty land. Grow Youngstown, a nonprofit working to develop community gardens and increase Youngstown’s access to healthy, locally produced food, is one of several organizations in town doing a lot of creative work towards that goal. Currently, they’re working to create a local food policy council; as of August 19 they’d formed a core council of 10, with the goal of seating a council of 21 people by January.

Gro-Yo serves as an educator and marketer for a 70-member CSA that draws on three farms from around the region, and has have drops in inner-city neighborhoods dubbed “food deserts” in Youngstown and Warren. The organization also provides administration, design assistance, and organizing assistance to the Fairgreen Neighborhood Garden (pictured above). This year Fairgreen has 12 community gardeners and 30 beds, plus a cachement system, worm composting, and beehives.  The group’s next big project is slated to be a food and yard waste composting center within the city of Youngstown. And it was Grow Youngstown that Suzannah hooked me up with as a new Veggie Bingo partner. On Sunday, August 9, we staged a superfun bingo game at the Lemon Grove Cafe downtown, raising $380, half of which went to Grow Youngstown and half of which went to a Y-Town garden. But, that was Sunday — I’ll get to that later.

On Saturday, Suzannah’s mother, Mary June Tartan, sent us on a tour of local gardens. Mary June was for years director of housing for the city of Youngstown; now she’s retired and on the board the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, whose Lots of Green program turns vacant lots into gardens, pocket parks, bird habitats … you name it. Their newest and most ambitious project is ongoing in the city’s west-side Idora neighborhood. Idora was once home to an amusement park known as “Youngstown’s Million-Dollar Playground;” now, abandoned homes outnumber habitable ones. YNDC is in the process of tearing down the abandoned buildings and either turning them into gardens or seeding them with native plants in the hopes that the land will one day become integrated into neighboring Mill Creek Park which, at 2,800 acres, is the second-largest urban park in the country.

We also checked out Jubilee Gardens, a growing project affiliated with Youngstown’s Second Harvest Food Bank. At Jubilee we could only peer through the fence at what looked like a bumper crop of corn and other veggies, but we also stopped by a lovely, open little garden on Baldwin Street, near Wick Park. Here, the gardeners were raising chard, kale, broccoli, peppers, and more. I couldn’t resist taking some beauty shots:

We also stopped by the Northside Farmers’ Market, both to shop and to tell people about the next day’s bingo game. Of course, we were out of flyers by then, so our marketing strategy consisted of going around to every stall and telling the vendors about it, while waving our one grubby flyer around for visual interest. But, it seemed to work OK. About half of them, to my shock, had even heard whispers about it already.

The market is another small but heartening Youngstown success story — when he started it up  eight years ago, manager Joe Converse had to go out to area farms and buy produce to re-sell himself in the city. Now, a dozen or so farmers and producers set up every Saturday outside the Unitarian church on Elm Street, and the market accepts food stamps and WIC coupons, which helps them draw a racially and economically diverse crowd. And, frankly, made me wish farmers markets in Chicago sold pulled pork sandwiches.

This post is long enough already, so I’ll save the actual excitement of Veggie Bingo — with the mayor! — for tomorrow. In the meantime, I just had to squeeze in this last shot. Which says probably all there is to say about why supporting community gardening and healthy local food systems are worth driving seven hours across I-80 in a day.

Photos (top to bottom): Center for Working Class Studies, Youngstown State University; random Web postcard; stu_spivak; Elsa Higby. All else that follow by author.