UPDATE | Demolition of St. Joe’s, the ‘Nightmare on Tod Avenue,’ could start this summer

When Gov. Mike DeWine asked a crowd of a few dozen people gathered outside the former St. Joseph Riverside Hospital how many had been born there or whose children were born there, about a quarter of them raised their hands.

The first time Warren Mayor Doug Franklin broke his arm, it was treated at the nearly 90-year-old former Humility of Mary Health Care facility along Tod Avenue Northwest, he said.

It’s stood vacant since 1996, and it was condemned in 2012, the year Franklin took office. It’s now a haven for scrappers, vandals, vagrants and pests, the Tribune Chronicle reported in 2020.

St. Joseph Riverside stood behind Franklin on the unseasonably cold, gray Wednesday; humiliated with graffiti tags, each window an open maw of jagged glass fangs — a sight one man in the crowd called the “Nightmare on Tod Avenue.”

“Let’s never forget this hospital and the countless lives saved and babies that have been born here,” Franklin said to the dozens gathered near the end of the hospital’s 26-year goodbye.

“I was a baby here, too,” one woman piped up.

“Ditto,” echoed a man a few feet over.

Larry Larson, the city’s former 1st Ward councilperson and president of the Northwest Neighborhood Association, which has been advocating to raze the decrepit facility for about two decades, said his brother was born there. It also was where his father-in-law died.

“A lot of memories,” he later told reporters. “It took a village, really, to get this torn down.”

DeWine on Wednesday morning visited the hospital to formally announce a new $3.4 million state grant that has topped off funding for its demolition.

For years, Warren officials have wanted to demolish the blighted 15-acre site, but no one could ever line up the funding needed to bring down its 12 buildings, Larson told Mahoning Matters.

“We’d board it up, they’d tear it down,” Larson said Wednesday. “[Ne’er-do-wells] ... use it as a dumping ground, they use it for garbage.”

Today, the ruin abuts a domestic violence shelter, a drug rehabilitation center and a veterans clinic.

Franklin told Mahoning Matters that while more than a dozen abandoned commercial properties have been torn down in his tenure, none have had as big an impact on property values and quality of life as the St. Joe’s facility.

“I remember one resident saying, ... ‘We deserve better. The neighborhood deserves better. The city deserves better,’” Franklin recalled. “And all during this time when he was telling me this there were chants in the background: ‘This must come down.’

“You could hear those cries from blocks away.”

Franklin estimated the total demolition cost at nearly $6 million. The city has been seeking outside funding for the last 20 years, but “with little success.” Last year it received $2.5 million from the state for asbestos remediation, he said.

But this week, the county’s land bank was awarded more than $3.4 million through the Ohio Brownfield Remediation Program to bring it down. The one-time program, included in the state’s most recent biennial budget, set aside $350 million from the general fund to clean up and tear down sites like St. Joseph across the state.

“These big buildings just cost a lot of money to get rid of,” the governor said. “It’s not just blowing ‘em up or knocking ‘em down. You’ve got remediation. Many of them have asbestos. Lord knows what else they have in them. This takes real money.”

The first round of $60 million, announced this week, is going to projects in 35 Ohio counties. DeWine told reporters Wednesday the state has received enough applications to account for nearly the whole pot.

“Many of these brownfield sites can be used for economic development, but you have to clean them up first,” DeWine said. “No company is gonna wait two years to clean this up.”

St. Joseph Riverside will be revitalized for residential or commercial and industrial development, according to a news release from the governor’s office.

The city is expected to award demolition contracts by the end of May, Franklin said.

“By June, hopefully we’ll have a wrecking ball in here,” he told reporters.

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Valley officials also told us about several other abandoned or underutilized properties that they’re eager to turn around or tear down. We shared those in today’s Morning Matters newsletter. Sign up for our free newsletters here.