Meeting Ohio - Alex Chueh

That’s what John Kennedy, the animated owner-operator of the Royal Oaks, tells people who come to his bar. After all, he proclaims proudly, “I’ve had millionaires sit next to crackheads.” The Oaks is a proper dive: façade half-caked in ivy, wooden fixtures dominant in the interior, a crowd preoccupied solely with good old-fashioned banter. And it’s where I met locals in Youngstown, a place where pretentiousness goes to die. This city, once America’s steel capital, has lost 100,000 people in 100 years; I thought it’d be fitting to start my Midwestern road trip in a quintessentially Rust Belt locale. Indeed, the visuals of manual labor are inescapable here. Streets are dotted with metalworking operations, repair shops, purveyors of farming equipment; signage is bold, usually in capital letters, bordering on garish — no minimalist, Instagrammable logos, no funky brand names crafted to vaguely resemble foreign languages. I couldn’t resist pulling over into vacant dust-and-pebble parking lo

That’s what John Kennedy, the animated owner-operator of the Royal Oaks, tells people who come to his bar. After all, he proclaims proudly, “I’ve had millionaires sit next to crackheads.” The Oaks is a proper dive: façade half-caked in ivy, wooden fixtures dominant in the interior, a crowd preoccupied solely with good old-fashioned banter. And it’s where I met locals in Youngstown, a place where pretentiousness goes to die. This city, once America’s steel capital, has lost 100,000 people in 100 years; I thought it’d be fitting to start my Midwestern road trip in a quintessentially Rust Belt lo