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Seventy-nine years ago, I was born at St. Joseph Riverside Hospital on Tod Avenue on the northwest side of Warren. Driving by recently, it was difficult to even see the first floor of that now-abandoned building through the car window. The site is obscured by the high weeds that grow along the chain link fence that encloses the other weeds and the grass growing up through the cracks in the parking lot. That’s a little sad.
When I was a tot, my mom got her hair done at the Adams Beauty Parlor in the wedge-shaped Adams Building situated in the “V” formed by the convergence of West Market Street and South Street. When I had no sitter, I accompanied Mom to the most boring time imaginable. The beauty operators would give me a large horseshoe magnet, which I used to pick up hairpins and bobby pins off the floor. I thought I smelled hair burning the whole time. The Adams Building is gone now, and so is that boredom. Somehow I don’t regret that too much.
I was a student for six years at Garfield Elementary School on Montclair Street. Garfield was a beautiful brick edifice with a slate roof built in the Tudor style. It’s gone now, replaced by a grassy field with some nice vegetable gardens at its north end. I miss some of the teachers, and some not so much. It would have been nice to have visited that building on a little sentimental journey.
After Garfield, I spent three years at East Junior High on South Street. It was no architectural wonder, but it’s gone now, too. It’s replaced by another grassy field.
Across South Street from East was the Children’s Home. It was situated between South and East Market. Quite a few kids from there attended classes at East. These were the most well-behaved kids I ever knew. Our family would frequently play host to some of those kids, and my dad would give them airplane rides over the city. You guessed it, the home is gone now. It’s the site of Trumbull Memorial Hospital’s parking lot. Some of the rubble from that building was unceremoniously dumped in an empty lot next to my former home on North Road. That’s progress.
My next three years were at the Greek revival-inspired Warren G. Harding High School. Most of it is gone, with the exception of a tombstone-like (sorry, city fathers) center edifice preserved for the years to come. I missed my chance to visit before the razing of most of it. A new high school has been built where the Trumbull County Fairgrounds once were.
Every movie house where I enjoyed the great movies of the ’40s and ’50s is gone. The Daniel, Robins, Ohio, Post (or Look), and Harris Warren theaters are just memories now.
During high school I worked at the Warren Transportation Company bus garage. My job was to fuel, check fluids, and soap-brush the wheels and fronts and backs of the buses that came in after their run. I then would run the buses through the wash rack, park them and sweep them out. That building still stands there with an air of dignity at 538 W. Market St., but it is abandoned and has some boarded-up or smashed windows. Its ignominious end represents the end of an era when people found mass transportation inexpensive and convenient.
On Courthouse Square, at the corner of Market and North Park was a dark green painted shelter that was built to protect westbound bus patrons, including me, from the weather. It was derisively called the “sheep shed.” It certainly wasn’t pretty, but it did the job. It’s gone.
After I finished college and the U.S. Army, I finally got a real job at Packard Electric. I spent most of my years of employment there in the Dana Street administration building. It’s been 23 years since I’ve been in that building, but it’s abandoned and I understand that the tunnel that goes under Dana Street over to Plants 3 and 4 is filled with four feet of water. That abandonment reflects the end of another era.
By the way, the apartment house I lived in at 429 Atlantic before I was married is now a weedy empty lot.
Many of us like to go back to our old haunts. We’re filled with nostalgia when we walk down memory lane. My sentimental journey has either been bulldozed or abandoned. That’s life in Warren, Ohio.
Mumford is a Warren resident. Email him at editorial@tribtoday.com