As our tour of this non-stop-coffee-riddled town continued we found ourselves in the halls of the newly completed Youngstown Cultural Arts Center — an accessible, multicultural, affordable arts center which will annually serve about 75,000 people. A renovated school building, this four story building dates back to 1917 and houses 3 stories of artist live/work space (with rents based on the median income of the tenant!) on top of a ground floor chock full of facilities — from a 150-seat theater, to a media lab, recording studio, workshop, movement studio, dressing rooms, kitchen, and classrooms — all of which are available for rental to the public at exceedingly affordable rates! The space has already been used to, among other things, host a youth poetry slam which created a safe place for youth of widely varying backgrounds to make themselves vulnerable as they spoke eloquently about issues close to their hearts, homes, and realities.

To find out more about the renovation that transformed the Cooper School into the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, visit:
http://www.onecommunitycampaign.org/projects/cooper/index.html

And form information on the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center as its current incarnation visit:
http://www.youngstownarts.org/