Christmas Lighting Installation in Youngstown, OH

In December 2010, Youngstown recorded 53.1 inches of snow. That is the snowiest month in the city's records, and it landed in the exact weeks a holiday display is expected to be up and working. The season it belonged to, 2010-11, totaled 118.7 inches.

At the other end of the record, the winter of 1948-49 produced 25.2 inches. Anyone planning a December display around a typical Youngstown winter should know that typical covers a range from two feet to nearly ten.

The averages are demanding on their own. Snowfall here runs 67.8 inches a season, January is the coldest month at a mean of 26.8 degrees, and the city sees 43 days a year at or below freezing with 4.1 days at or below zero. Forty three freezing days is a large share of a display's working life.

Whatever holds a run to a gutter has to hold it through that, and whatever removes it in January has to work on hardware that has been frozen into place for weeks. The install method and the removal method are the same decision, made once, in November.

Youngstown's terrain is gentler than the numbers suggest and that helps. The city sits at about 856 feet in the Mahoning Valley on the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau, where the last ice age left a broadly uniform plain cut by valleys such as the one carrying the Mahoning River. Being on the valley floor, Youngstown addresses can get rain while Canfield and Columbiana, a few hundred feet higher, get the frozen version of the same storm.

The city's grandest residential streets ask the most of a display. The periphery of Wick Park on the north side is lined with early twentieth century mansions built by industrialists and business leaders during the boom years, and the Crandall Park-Fifth Avenue Historic District still holds many of the executive houses from the same period.

Those are three story elevations with heavy cornices, dormers, complex roof planes and a great deal of height between the ground and the primary gutter line. Height changes the whole calculation, because a run that is straightforward at twelve feet is a different job at thirty.

On a tall elevation the honest advice is to light fewer lines and light them properly. A single crisp run along the primary cornice on a three story house does more than three ragged runs across cornice, dormers and porch, and it is also the one that can be inspected and serviced without a second machine on site.

The houses on those streets were designed with strong horizontal emphasis. Stating that emphasis once is usually enough.

South of downtown the housing is different again. The South Side is the city's densest and most populous division, with older neighborhoods such as Oak Hill, Erie and Lower Gibson settled during the nineteenth century, and later ones like Fosterville, Lansingville and Brownlee Woods added as the city expanded through the first half of the twentieth century.

Tight lots and modest frontages there mean a display is judged against its immediate neighbors, so an even line and a consistent color temperature carry more weight than scale. Mill Creek Park, five miles of woodland and 2,600 acres established in 1891 and listed on the National Register in 2005, gives the streets along its edge the dark backdrop that flatters any of it.