Saturday was the anniversary of the Norfolk Southern train derailment in the Northeast Ohio village of East Palestine.
The train was carrying hazardous chemicals, and the accident led to a massive fire, a huge smoke cloud and lingering questions about the long-term effects of the pollution.
Every morning on February 2nd, a small crowd forms around a local radio station in Marion, about 50 miles north of Columbus. They’ve come from all across the state to answer a vital question.
“Is he going to see his shadow?” a WMRN radio broadcaster shouted to a crowd at the 2020 celebration, riling them up into a chorus of naysaying.
The lunchroom at Akron’s Findley Community Learning Center is filled with the sound of different languages being spoken: Spanish, Swahili, Nepalese.
When Cardell Belfoure was imprisoned at Grafton Correctional Institute in northeast Ohio, poetry was his refuge. Now that he has reentered society, he’s using his literary talent to center the stories of other formerly incarcerated people.
Lima city councilwoman Carla Thompson said many renters in her city are struggling against unsafe housing conditions. With an older housing stock and a growing rental population, she said tenants are vulnerable.
“I have seen multiple roach and rat infestations that no human should be living through,” Thompson said.
Atlee Kaufman opened Bentwood Solutions four decades ago. The Millersburg business’s original product was bending buggy shafts, which connect the carriages of Amish people like Kaufman to their horses. A few years later, he expanded to table and chair parts at a local Amish furniture maker’s request. He was so successful he sold off the buggy shaft division.
Ohio lost 30 newspapers between 2022 and 2023.
Behind the sweeping walls of Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, something beautiful has been holding its breath.
Since the late 1980s, the Art Deco train station housing the Cincinnati Museum Center has been home to an enormous pipe organ built by the renowned E.M. Skinner company. The first concert in the station drew more than a thousand people in the 1990s.
Ohio housing advocates are predicting a greater number of unhoused people in this year’s annual survey of homelessness.
A decade ago, there were more than 1,500 vacant homes in the northeast Ohio city of Warren.
The area’s population fell rapidly following the industrial decline of the 1980s, leaving behind a trail of empty buildings.
But one local organization is working to address those vacancies.
