YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The banquets and events industry in the Mahoning Valley remains competitive, with new venues joining the market in recent years.
Among the new venues that have opened since 2020 are two properties that have been repurposed from their previous uses and a newly constructed third center that made its debut during a challenging time for the hospitality industry.
Blue Lotus
Blue Lotus Banquette & Event Center celebrated its opening in August.
“It’s a slow process, but we’re getting there,” Jina Makwana, co-owner, says.
Divinity Hospitality LLC, owned by Jina Makwana and her husband, Haresh, purchased the former Niles YMCA building, 995 Youngstown-Warren Road, for $200,000 in April 2016.
Jina credits her husband for having a vision for the property. He saw the building sitting idle and wanted it to serve “a better purpose” in the community.
For the first two years, the Makwanas contemplated what to do with the building, Jina says. They settled on the banquet center concept because many of the other event centers in the area require the use of their in-house food provider or restrict which outside caterers can be used.
“A lot of people like freedom. They want their own thing,” Jina says. “It gives them the opportunity to look beyond what everybody else is offering.”
The process of converting the former YMCA into an event center involved extensive renovations. A former pool and a basketball court have been turned into the building’s two main event halls. Converting the property cost about $2 million, Haresh says.
“I don’t think anything in this building is actually the same,” hall manager Ginger Ripley says.
Blue Lotus recently began advertising its availability. “Once they see the property they like it,” she reports.
Eastwood Event Centre
Eastwood Event Centre, part of the Eastwood Mall Complex in Niles, opened its doors in October 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Because of the timing of the opening, the 15,800-square-foot center, which is attached to Eastwood Mall and Residence Inn, is “finding that we still are working to get our name out there and to get the community familiar with us,” Toni Cameron, director of sales and catering, says.
But bookings are on the rise, she reports. With spaces available to accommodate seating for up to 700 people, bookings are up from three to four events per month roughly a year and a half ago to 12 to 15 events some months.
“I feel like people are finally wanting to have larger gatherings, which has been really great for us, so I would say we’re definitely on the upswing,” she says. “A lot of people who had been delaying any type of social gathering are really becoming more open to the idea and are starting to book.”
Events held at the center run the gamut, she reports. They include social events like showers and weddings, corporate events and charitable functions.
Among those are the American Heart Association’s Heart Ball and Sight for All United’s Eye Ball. “All of those events we have done in the past have rebooked, but because we’ve been successful in those events we’ve been able to obtain others as well,” she says.
Woodland Estate
Nate and Dani Wilson held the first event in their Woodland Estate event center in Liberty Township in early 2021.
The couple had operated the Woodland Cellars winery and meadery in Hubbard since 2017. They purchased the former Sacred Heart Retreat House on Logan Avenue in Liberty in 2020, Nate says, and immediately began renovation work.
“We just fell in love with it, and we thought we should expand the winery,” Dani recalls. “We had a lot of experience with putting on smaller events and we just kind of grew this vision from what we were doing at the time and to what this place could be.”
The former retreat house offers the ability to host a 500-person wedding but still has “the intimate, homelike feel of a mansion,” Nate says.
“Every single detail of this place is just so stunning,” Dani says. “This fireplace itself is a marvel on its own.”
The Wilsons worked for months to obtain the building, taking steps to stabilize it to prevent its condition from further deteriorating even before closing on the property. They ultimately did so in April 2020, just weeks after pandemic restrictions forced the shutdown of hospitality establishments, though the winery eventually was able to sell its products with a drive-through system.
“It was a little bit of a hectic time for us, but it did give us time, the time that we may not have had to just be here and just work,” Dani offers philosophically. “We were able to be here and really put 100% every day into the property, into fixing it.”
The Wilsons started hosting events in the property’s pavilion in 2020, when restrictions were eased enough to permit socially distanced small outdoor gatherings if attendees wore protective masks, she says. The first event in the mansion was a small wedding in February 2021.
The biggest shift since the beginning has been from being a winery to a winery-based wedding venue, according to Nate. “We started this very much as a really nice upscale winery concept but the further we got into the winery the more people asked about weddings,” he says.
The building remains a work in progress, so the Wilsons haven’t pushed bookings, though they are still averaging four to five events each month, Dani says.
“We have started pushing it out a little bit more and we are starting to book for 2025 and into 2026,” she says.
Pictured at top: Nate and Dani Wilson opened Woodland Estate event center in 2021.