MAHONING VALLEY
Oral history details Ukrainian enclave on Youngstown’s West End BY THOMAS WELSH
T
en years before Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian frontier, 93-yearold area resident Harry Nachim shared his impressions of the bustling neighborhood that once surrounded Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church in Youngstown’s Arlington Heights District. Nachim, a retired steelworker and World War II veteran, described solemn religious ceremonies and raucous political rallies, while chronicling the spirit of cooperation that bound together a neighborhood which reflected the city’s ethnic and racial diversity. The interview, which occurred on Feb. 10, 2012, was planned as part of a larger oral-history project encouraged by the Ethnic Heritage Society, an organization then headquartered at Holy Apostles—Sts. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church, just a block north of Holy Trinity. Two days after my conversation with Harry Nachim, however, I was swept up in a family tragedy that forced me to abandon the project. Hence, a recording of the interview sat, undisturbed, in a business envelope for the next decade. Then, on the heels of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, Mark C. Peyko, editor of the Metro Monthly, contacted me with an unexpected request for any information that I might have on the local Ukrainian-American community. My mind turned instantly to that long-ago interview. While Harry Nachim passed away in April 2017, I was pleased to learn that his wife, Charlotte, 10 years his junior, is alive and well. What follows is a brief overview of her late husband’s impressions of a district once known as Youngstown’s “West End.” Today, little remains of the neighborhood he described, beyond a clutch of Catholic and Baptist churches, each of which served as the centerpiece of a densely populated residential area. Like most good storytellers, Nachim started at the beginning. He explained that his father, Nicholas “Nick” Nachim, was born in 1893, in the tiny village of Lipa, which was then located in the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. The elder Nachim’s journey to America was facilitated by his own father, who had left for New York in search of greater opportunities. Harry Nachim indicated that his mother, Mary Kozak, was also born in Lipa, in 1895. Yet, his parents did not meet until the early 1910s, when they worked together at the
IMAGE COURTESY OF HOLY TRINITY
Ukrainian Choir ‘Boyan’ of Holy Trinity, Youngstown, 1930.
IMAGE COURTESY OF HOLY TRINITY
Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church, West Rayen Avenue, in an undated photo.
American Linen Mills in Fulton, N.Y. Nicholas’s labor yielded a paltry 10 cents an hour; Mary earned even less. After a brief courtship, the couple was married in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1914. Two years later, after the birth of their eldest child, Anne, they were briefly separated when Nick set out to search for better prospects. “My dad heard about Youngstown steel, where they were making 27 cents an hour,” Harry Nachim observed. “So, that was a big raise… and he said, ‘I’m leaving this joint.’”
10 METRO MONTHLY | CRISIS IN UKRAINE
The industrial boomtown Nick Nachim encountered hosted a growing Ukrainian-American community. Since the arrival of the area’s first Ukrainian immigrant in the late 1880s, the community had witnessed a flurry of institution building, including the establishment of Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church in 1909. The church edifice was completed two years later. Nick Nachim quickly discovered that jobs were abundant. “The same day he came here, he got hired at Republic Steel in downtown
Youngtown,” Harry Nachim said. “That’s the job he had till be retired [in 1962].” By the time Harry Nachim was born in December 1918, his mother, father, and older sister were living in a rowhouse on the eastern end of downtown Youngstown, an immigrant enclave studded with low-end businesses. “[They had] everything…from clothing stores to raincoat [manufacturers] to pawnshops,” he recalled. “You would even find that they had an Isaly’s dairy store. So, you can see how far back that goes.” In 1925, when Nachim was about six years old, his younger brother, Ted, was born, and the family began to look around for more spacious lodgings. They eventually settled in an apartment in the brick hall that still stands across the street from Holy Trinity. The structure, which currently serves as Holy Trinity’s parish social hall, was then owned by a Ukrainian-American mutual aid society called Narodna Dopomoho (“People’s Aid”). The social hall was a landmark in what had become a thriving ethnic neighborhood. “They had a cluster of houses right next to the hall, on the lefthand side, facing the hall,” Nachim observed. “They had mostly Ukrainian families [living there]…. They all belonged to the church.” Intermixed with the district’s large Ukrainian-American population were dozens of Croatian-American families, most of whom worshipped at nearby Sts. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church. The neighborhood’s multiethnic character notwithstanding, Nachim found plenty of evidence that pointed to its markedly different past. He indicated that West Rayen Avenue (now Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard) was lined with the aging mansions of the city’s old Anglo-American elite. “At that time, it seems like…that neighborhood was converting,” he explained. “They had the original Youngstowners still living there.” His nearest neighbors included once-prominent figures like J.W. Parkman, a retired transportation magnate whose carriages and teams of horses were maintained in stables that were located at the back of his property. As a paperboy, Nachim occasionally entered the more impressive houses along his route, and he was especially drawn to a stately home at the corner of North Avenue and West Rayen Avenue. “When I went into the house, there was a portrait on the righthand side [of the vestibule], and… it stayed with my memory,” he said. “It See ORAL HISTORY, Page 11
