Michael Williamson documents recession in Youngstown

Michael Williamson was named Photographer of the Year by the White House News Photographers’ Association. He works for the Washington Post and has collaborated on several books with Dale Maharidge. I had the good fortune, thanks to John Russo, to have lunch with both of them last year as they were passing through Youngstown, revisiting the stories of the homeless, unemployed and underemployed who have borne the brunt of deindustrialization here in the Great Lakes region and across the country. The two won a Pulitzer Prize for And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

William Santiago by Michael Williamson

Today’s Washington Post features a story by Anne Hull titled “Recession hitting Ohio’s former steel towns hard” and featuring photographs of Michael Williamson. I actually viewed Williamson’s photo gallery of hard times in the Mahoning Valley first before reading the story, and I knew what I was about to read was going to be tough.

In this corner of northeast Ohio, from Warren to Youngstown, where the old steel mills along the Mahoning River stand like rusted-out mastodons in the weeds, the recession was a final cruelty piled on top of three decades of disappearing jobs.

The recession here wasn’t a black hole at the end of a sustained boom, or downgrading from Target to Wal-Mart or cutting out $3 drinks at Starbucks. It was a confrontation with survival.

As other areas of the country start to revive, the recession’s full force is still on display here. Winter has descended. Unemployment benefits are running out. New jobs have not appeared.

Shuttered Avanti plant by Michael Williamson

This is not a story about Turning Technologies, urban pioneers or the creative class. It takes a hard look at the Valley we see both too much and too little.

Here is what the recovery looks like in the land of the working class:

Grown women in hairnets are working alongside teenagers at drive-through windows, and college graduates are loading bread trucks.

“A 48-year-old Youngstown man was charged, accused of stealing $14 worth of food from Rite Aid Pharmacy,” reads an entry in the weekly police report published in the Vindicator. “A Youngstown woman, 21, was charged with filling a shopping cart with $154 worth of groceries and leaving an Aldi food store without paying.”

In a place defined by work, there is little to be had.

The writing is full of vivid details.

Sgt. Carmen Sagnimeni is sitting in a county office building wondering if anyone is hiring soldiers.

A poster in the Trumbull County Veterans Service Commission announces that November is “Hire a Vet Month,” but prospects are bleak for those returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. In wars being disproportionately fought by the working class, the reward for coming home to this part of Ohio is “The Deer Hunter” with an Olive Garden.

Sagnimeni is just back from his second tour in Iraq with the Pennsylvania National Guard. He is 30, with a weary smile and a jiggling leg. He already has orders to go to Afghanistan in 2012. Until then, he has a mortgage and three kids to feed. His only lead so far is a $9-an-hour security guard job he found while surfing Monster.com in Iraq.

He goes in to see Herman Breuer, a veterans affairs officer and fellow Iraq vet whose spotless desk is appointed with a mini-tombstone paperweight chiseled with the words “headstone marker and burial benefits desk.” Sagnimeni listens as Breuer patiently explains his options, urging him to consider using the Post-9/11 GI Bill to go to college until the economy gets better. As far as decent jobs, Breuer is unusually blunt. “My best advice is to look into moving,” he tells the young sergeant.

Steel Man by Michael Williamson

Today, Megan Lynn Reed, Howard Tattrie and I will be meeting with a reporter who’s in town writing for Parade magazine. As we talk about our jobs in the Federal Street technology corridor and our homes that keep us warm, we would do well to remember the workers still looking for a living wage and the homeless huddled by a fire under a bridge.

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