The Parkway Tower Apartments building was built in 1928-1929 and has about 40 efficiency, one and two-bedroom units in it. It has an old electric elevator with a sliding steel gate and a single, hinged door on each floor that swings out when opened.

The front and back sections of the building both have a set of spiral stairs for fire escape. In the old days, Parkway Tower was home to some prominent Youngstown's citizens. Jack Warner of the famous Warner Brothers Studios is alleged to have resided there at one time. Murray Nadler, an attorney in Youngstown, once lived there.

Judge Elwyn Jenkins also lived there at one time. I remember a wealthy old lady named Mrs. Schaff, on the eighth floor. She may have been related to the family that owned the Peck Schaff house on the YSU Cmpus.

Another elderly lady named Mrs Henrietta Roscoe, who still lived there at the time I was there, moved in when the building was just being completed. She lived in the Parkway Tower for almost fifty years. Mrs. Roscoe once told my mother that when she moved into the building, the elevator was not in service yet and she had to walk up and down five or six flights of the spiral stairs in the rear stairwell until the elevator was completed.

The building is has a steel girder skeleton and was touted as one of the first "modern, fire-proof" apartment buildings in Youngstown. The apartments all have oak floors, but the structural floors underneath are made of reinforced concrete and the walls are plaster and concrete over expanded steel lathe.

The apartments were steam heated by a common boiler (fairly recent) in the basement, which sits next to the origal boiler that is now defunct. The original boiler is so large that it must have been set into place before the building was built over it, and was coal fired back in the old days. It was later converted to natural gas.

I have been told that in recent years, one of the owners had the building wired for electric heating in each unit, but that the wiring job was poorly done.

The boiler room used to have a coal chute to the outside, which was filled in and paved over on the outside of the building in the 1980's. In the old days, the building had a door man at the front door and shops and stores on the first floor for the convenience of the residents.

The frontmost, lower section of the building was originally designed to be eight stories high, like the back riser, but it was decided that it would dwarf the single family homes around the building so the decision was made to raise the front section to only three stories.

The front of the building used to have diamond shaped leaded glass panels in th windows, but it was updated with modern thermal windows in the late 1980's. In the back section of the building, there are only two bedroom apartments on floors 4 through 8, just two apartments to each floor. These were truly "pentouse" apartments in their day.

Many of the apartments used to have Murphy beds - these were folding beds that were installed in closets with double doors. All of the efficiency units and some of the one bedroom units had mini kitchens built into closets with folding doors.

The building has an incinerator in the basement with a chute on each floor for sending burnable trash down to it. Sadly, the incinerator is no longer in service and the chutes in the hallways have since been bolted shut.

The building used to have an aluminum awning on the front porch, with a canvas awning extending all the way out to the curb in front. These are now long gone. Beautiful hedges used to line the front of the building and the porch floor has ceramit tile. The rooftops on the building are flat, and from the upper roof you get a fantastic view of the Wick Park and downtown Youngstown.

The Parkway Tower has been through several owners since I left Youngstown, and was last sold to new owners in November of 2004 for around $200,000 - nowhere near what this building is actually worth. The building has had some water and electrical problems, according to current residents, and has deteriorated somewhat inside but it is still a solid, beautiful, classy old building.