KSU students to offer ideas for St. Joseph Riverside Hospital site

KSU students to offer ideas for St. Joseph Riverside Hospital site

WARREN -- With the old St. Joseph Riverside Hospital at long last beginning to come down, a major question on the minds of residents is: "What's next?"

Will the land become a park? Housing? Or something else entirely?

Students from Kent State University's College of Architectural and Environmental Design have a few ideas about the site's future use. A dozen students from a third-year design studio will propose their visions from 4 to 6 p.m. Wednesday at BRITE, 225 W. Market St.

"We've been working on this for the past three months, so finally being able to get input on what people living in the city feel about our designs is going to be a great experience," said student Julia Stark from Clarkston, Mich.

KSU associate professor Bill Willoughby said when coming up with ideas, students took into consideration the nearness of the river, traffic flow on Tod Avenue NW and what might be beneficial to the neighborhood. They researched area demographics and topography, visited the site and met with members of the community.

Stark said while she previously has worked on projects where she got to visit a real site, this is her first time interacting with the "context" of the surrounding city and its people.

"Honestly, it's opened my eyes to how much thought has to go into a specific building," Stark said.

LARGE LAND

The 15-acre St. Joseph Riverside Hospital lot is next to the Mahoning River and adjacent, across the water, to Packard Park. It has long been an important site to the community, Willoughby said.

"I cannot tell you the number of community members who have told me that they were born in that hospital," Willoughby said.

The first part of the former hospital was built in 1923 and the eventual complex of 12 interconnecting buildings was operated until about 1995, when HM Health Services began moving to the former Warren General Hospital on the city's east side.

A low section of the complex started coming down last week, and a community event to celebrate the official start to the demolition of the longtime eyesore is scheduled for 2 p.m. Tuesday at 1307 Tod Ave. Warren Mayor Doug Franklin will "personally" begin the demolition, according to a news release.

The buildings, parking lots, and lighting are expected to be fully removed by spring.

WHAT'S NEXT

The land, which is now in the care of the Trumbull County Land Bank, will be given to the city. After that, the possibilities are nearly endless.

Willoughby said his students will propose a variety of ideas, from the easily achievable to more ambitious options.

"Each of the 12 students has taken a different approach, which I think will offer 12 different ideas to the community to see and hopefully gain inspiration from," Willoughby said.

Ideas that will be presented Wednesday include housing options, environmental centers, high-tech vocational training spaces, and a healing garden, among others.

After meeting with city officials and entrepreneurs who talked about making Warren attractive for younger people and the importance of nearby businesses growth, student Harrison Johnson of Greenwich, Ohio decided to focus on housing and access to sustainable food, clothing and furniture.

"There's not really a grocery store within a walkable or close distance," Harrison noted of the Tod Avenue area.

He said he and many other classmates also looked at ways to connect to the river as well as connect across the river, which has historically played a part in dividing the city.

He also wanted to incorporate communal spaces into his design, because young people are interested in experiences, he said.

COLLABORATION

The design studio course at KSU is meant to prepare students to work as professional architects. Students from Willoughby's class have looked at real sites before, including in the mid-2010s when they proposed ideas for Phelps Street in Youngstown.

Years later, the city implemented designs similar to those suggested by students, said Wiley Runnestrand.

Runnestrand, who used to work at Kent State fundraising for the college of architecture, has helped connect Willoughby and his classes to city projects. He said KSU students have worked with the Trumbull Neighborhood Partnership and in Garrettsville and Sandusky.

A Trumbull County native and entrepreneur, Runnestrand said students can provide great ideas before cities are ready to hire an architect or design firm.

"What you end up realizing is that all of us who are working in the city, we don't always have enough time to think about what a brighter future might look like," said Runnestrand. "Getting students to come in and help cities get that initial imagination going -- I always thought that was just a really valuable thing for cities."

He said it also makes students better designers by teaching them the importance of considering how their designs will impact people.

Johnson said it was "gratifying" to work on a project where his design may inspire something that will one day become reality.

"That definitely gave a lot of meaning to the project and also motivated all of us, because sometimes we get a little burnt out in studio, but it was like, 'this is a real project,'" Johnson said.

He said that working with the St. Joseph site, he learned about watersheds and retention, making walking paths useful, and, perhaps most importantly, how to read what a community needs versus what it wants.

"The relationship between architecture and people is that architecture doesn't mean as much if people aren't engaging with it," Johnson said. "I think that's something we really had to take into consideration with this site, because we didn't want to propose something that wouldn't be useful to the community."