They Built a City Out of Sand. The Man It's Named After Never Lived There. Gary, Indiana

In 1905 a lawyer bought nine thousand acres of sand dunes on Lake Michigan without telling anyone who he was working for. Three years later there was a steel mill on it, and a city laid out beside it with paved streets, sewers and an electric plant — all built by one corporation, all at once. They named it after the chairman of the board. He ran it from New York and never lived there. In 1919, when the men who built the city asked to meet him, he would not come to the door. This is the archival history of Gary, Indiana — the founding, the Gary Land Company, the Patch, the Gary Plan that 202 American cities copied, the strike of 1919, the Froebel School walkout of 1945, the redlining map, Richard Hatcher, and what the company left behind. It is not a tour of the ruins. There are plenty of those. 0:00 The lawyer who bought the sand 1:43 Nine thousand acres 4:51 The First Subdivision 8:14 South of the tracks 11:41 The Gary Plan 15:59 Seventy-one Broadway 20:04 One hundred thousand 23:25 Froebel 26:35 Midtown 29:50 The seventh of November 33:09 What the company left 37:19 Twenty-eight SOURCES Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division; Historic American Buildings Survey; Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest; Indiana Historical Bureau; STATS Indiana / Indiana Business Research Center; U.S. Census Bureau; Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute; Indiana Department of Environmental Management; Gary Police Department; Mohl & Betten, "Paternalism and Pluralism"; Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Archival photographs are public domain. Modern photography from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress. Some illustrative plates in this film are generated and are rendered in a non-photographic style so they cannot be mistaken for archival material. #GaryIndiana #CompanyTown #USSteel #AmericanHistory