Why Nobody Wants to Visit the Steel City America Forgot: Gary, Indiana

Gary, Indiana did not exist before 1906. That year, the United States Steel Corporation looked at empty sand dunes on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, purchased nine thousand acres of worthless lakefront land, and built a city from absolute scratch — streets, schools, churches, housing, hospitals, a complete urban infrastructure — designed entirely around the most efficient steel-producing operation in the history of American industry. They named it after Elbert Henry Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, a man who had never set foot in Indiana and who would visit the city bearing his name exactly once before he died. Within twenty years, 100,000 people lived in Gary — immigrants from Poland, Croatia, Mexico, and the American South who had answered the call of wages that exceeded anything available in the places they had left. By 1950, Gary's steel mills produced more raw steel per square mile than any other industrial facility on Earth. Michael Jackson was born here in 1958, in a two-bedroom house on Jackson Street, in a city that still believed its best days were ahead of it. But the same U.S. Steel that built Gary also decided, decades later, that Gary was no longer worth maintaining. The mill closures began in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s as the corporation shifted production to newer, cheaper facilities and left behind a workforce that had no transferable skills and a city that had no economic identity beyond the industry that had created it. By 1993, Gary had become the murder capital of the United States — a designation that reflected not some inherent quality of its people but the precise mathematical result of eliminating every legitimate economic opportunity from a community of 100,000 people and then reducing city services as the tax base collapsed. Today, Gary has fewer than 70,000 residents. More than 10,000 structures sit abandoned across a city built for a population that no longer exists. The steel mills that remain operate with a fraction of their historical workforce. And the two-bedroom house on Jackson Street where Michael Jackson was born draws visitors from around the world to a neighborhood that the city that surrounds it has largely given up on. A full history documentary about Gary, Indiana — from the sand dunes of Lake Michigan in 1906 to the steel city that America built, used, and abandoned. Copyright & Fair Use Disclaimer • This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary created for commentary, criticism and research. • Some archival photos and footage are used under the principles of Fair Use (Section 107, U.S. Copyright Act) for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.