Former Foster theater to be demolished
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YOUNGSTOWN - Determining that renovating the former Foster Art Theatre is too expensive, the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. plans to demolish the building in a couple of months.
When the YNDC bought the building in June 2021 for $99,999, the goals were to shut down the XXX theater at 2504 Glenwood Ave. on the city's South Side and to renovate it. The initial plan was to convert the building into four rental housing units and two smaller commercial units.
The YNDC initially wanted to spend about $1 million to renovate the building, but Ian Beniston, its executive director, said the agency quickly learned it was going to cost considerably more than that.
Beniston said: "This is a lesson learned. We haven't had too many swings and misses, but there were a lot of unknowns with repurposing this. We learned our lesson. It's going to be demolished."
Contractors told the YNDC that renovating the building would cost "several million dollars," Beniston said. Scaling the project back to two rental units resulted in offers to do the work for a couple of million dollars, Beniston said.
"The costs were not reasonable," Beniston said. "It didn't make any reasonable sense even with trying to save a historic building. Why put four apartments in there when we can do more?"
Demolition of the old theater will cost about $150,000. The YNDC received $200,000 from the city of Youngstown's American Rescue Plan allocation and used a portion of it for predevelopment work and for demolition, Beniston said.
The removal of asbestos from the building is nearing completion and the demolition will begin in the next few months, Beniston said.
Instead of two or four rental units at the Foster site, Beniston said the YNDC is building seven rental units across the street from the former theater next year and will add another five nearby in 2028. Also, the plan is to build four to six units in 2028 at the Foster site, Beniston said.
Beniston said: "We struck out on preserving the Foster, but we'll deliver more housing units than we said in the first place."
Also, Beniston said, the theater building is structurally in bad shape, with nothing done to it for the past 30 or 40 years and the cost to renovate it "would be too high. Reality is much more complex. But there will be new life and new development there."
The YNDC will also demolish a vacant building, which used to be an automotive repair garage, across the street from the theater.
The YNDC has spent years and millions of dollars revitalizing the Glenwood Avenue corridor by building new residential homes — both to buy and to rent — as well as renovating buildings, attracting new businesses and demolishing dilapidated structures. While its focus is on Youngstown's South Side, the YNDC has done work throughout the city and in other local communities to stabilize housing and neighborhoods.
The Foster was built in 1938 and showed mainstream movies for years. The theater, which had about 700 seats, began showing art house films in the 1960s and then switched to pornographic films in the 1970s. In its final years, it also sold XXX-rated videos.
Foster closed in March 2020 when the state forced all movie theaters to shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it never reopened. In June 2021, the YNDC bought the theater building from Dee Barber, who had owned it since 1999, for $99,999.