Despite a tight budget and declining tax dollars, the city gave Joseph a $1.5 million grant to help develop the site, one of the largest awards of its kind in city history. So officials did what they had done many times before. Chill-Can represented the first major investment in the city in six years. More than a third of residents lived below the poverty line. The city’s unemployment rate hovered around 8% - higher than the national average. Listen to WKSU’s News Reportįor Youngstown, it was a potential lifeline. “We’ll service everything up to Boston, down to Florida, out to Dallas,” Joseph proclaimed. Then-Mayor John McNally and Youngstown State University President Jim Tressel applauded as Joseph drove a shovel into a patch of turf along Lane Avenue and officially kick-started a project that officials said would manufacture 1 billion cans a year. “To be able to come back after almost 100 years on the same exact property and take technology that is revolutionary in the beverage industry and bring it back to Youngstown is very gratifying to us.” on the site at the turn of the 20th century, before it closed shop in 1971.
His great-grandfather, he said, had founded the Star Bottling Co. Its motto: “The Ice Age Is Over!”ĭressed in a dark suit and pink tie, Mitchell Joseph, the firm’s chairman and CEO, beamed as he addressed more than 100 friends, family members and city officials. International, a California-based beverage company, had pledged to build a $20 million research and manufacturing campus and create hundreds of new jobs. Reeling from decades of decline, the area was a patchwork of potholed streets, weeded lots, moldering homes and drive-thru liquor marts.īut on this day, the city, once a national center of steel manufacturing and now a poster child for industrial decay, was celebrating the groundbreaking of a new venture: Chill-Can, the world’s first self-chilling beverage can. On an unseasonably warm November morning in 2016, Youngstown’s business and political leaders crowded onto a small, scraggly plot of land on the Ohio city’s long-suffering East Side.
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