SitemapAbout a year before she was born, Lana Shagrin Oyer’s dad welcomed another baby into the world: the Foster Theatre.
Joe Shagrin opened Youngstown’s first neighborhood theater in 1938 “on a Christmas night to a packed house,” Esther Hamilton wrote in the Youngstown Vindicator in 1955.
He and his associates reportedly spent $100,000 to build the playhouse at 2504 Glenwood Ave. Now, 82 years later, the dilapidated remnant of a once-prosperous Fosterville was sold for $99,999.
The iconic theater — which until the pandemic showed pornographic films and has fallen into disrepair — will get a second (or perhaps third) life with reinvestment from the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation.
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