Youngstown is a former steel city in the Mahoning Valley of northeastern Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border. The collapse of the steel industry in the late 1970s — "Black Monday" in September 1977, when the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company shut its Campbell Works — devastated the city, and Youngstown became a national symbol of deindustrialisation. The population has fallen from 170,000 at its peak to around 60,000.
What remains is an honest, unpretentious city with some genuine points of interest. The Butler Institute of American Art, the first museum in the country dedicated exclusively to American art, has a strong collection and is free to enter. The Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor — the "steel museum" — tells the story of the mills and their collapse with admirable candor. Mill Creek MetroParks offers good hiking through a forested gorge and the Fellows Riverside Gardens. The city's Italian heritage shows in the restaurants and bakeries on the south side, and the new Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre on the Mahoning River points toward a more optimistic future.