I'm sure many people here have heard of the sad story of Gary, Indiana, and how it came to be second only to Detroit for concentration of abandoned buildings in the USA. The two cities suffered very similar problems and fates, but unlike Detroit which is having millions of dollars worth of regeneration work done to the core of the city Gary, located little more than an hours train ride from downtown Chicago has been left to fester and rot and decay.
Gary was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corp. as a home for it's new steel plant, with the city being named after lawyer Elbert Henry Gary, the founding chairman of the company. Over time it grew into a large city, with the jobs offered by the various steel plants creating a surge in population and the city grew and expanded, reaching it's peak in 1960 with 178,320 residents. Gary's founding industry was to be it's downfall though, as come the rise in cheap imported steel from the early 1960s onwards the city entered a spiral of decline it never recovered from. The growing competitiveness from imported steel resulted in mass layoffs at the steel plants, in 1970 30,000 people were employed at the plant and as of 2015 it had reduced to a little over 5,000 people. These problems were exacerbated by a rapid change in the racial makeup of the city during the latter half of the 20th Century also. In 1930 21% of the city's population was African-American, by the early 2000s this had changed to 84%, with the change amplified by so-called 'white flight' after the steel plant began it's series of redundancies and white families began moving away from the declining city into the surrounding suburbs. By 2013 it was estimated that over a third of all homes in Gary were abandoned, and from the peak of it's population in 1960 it's estimated to have fallen by over half to just over 80,000 people.
Because of this, as you can imagine there are a lot of abandoned buildings. Schools, factories, hospitals, apartment blocks, pretty much everything you can think of. Gary is a weird place because you can actually go to City Hall and purchase a license to photograph inside any abandoned city-owned building (pretty much everything except the schools), as the local officials realised that so many people visit Gary just to photograph the abandoned stuff that they may as well try and get a little bit of money from it. Usually most casual photographers don't bother but it's certainly a novel idea and way of getting a little extra cash into a desperately poor city.
I paid my first visit to Gary on my first ever trip to the States. I couldn't quite get a trip to Detroit worked out at that time but I was staying with a friend in Chicago for part of the trip so it'd have been remiss of me to not jump on a train and head to Gary for a little while. The problem was that the visit to Gary was planned to be right at the tail end of a ridiculously manic long weekend of travelling and exploring, so by the time I arrived in Gary early on a Sunday afternoon I was extremely sleep deprived, having been awake since 4.30am Friday morning. The trip had taken me and my buddy from NYC to Albany to Newark, where we'd jumped on a plane to Memphis with a brief stop in Atlanta, and then on another plane up to Chicago all in three days whilst doing explores and stuff in between on zero sleep. By the time I got to the airport in Memphis I honestly don't know how I was still awake, and I can't remember a thing pretty much from the Saturday night onwards. All I can recall is desperately trying to not fall asleep in a blues bar in Memphis, and then somehow getting on a plane. I do however recall the landing at Chicago Midway airport, which is pretty alarming if you've never landed there before. There are houses built pretty much up to the airport fenceline, so it really does look and feel like you're about to crash into a residential area when arriving. I further remember Midway due to the airport workers temporarily misplacing my rucksack which had all of my worldly possessions in it, which wasn't fun. As such we missed our intended train into Gary and had to settle for a slightly later one, but after the panic of not being able to locate my bag I wasn't too concerned about that.
My first steps into Gary were surreal also, but maybe that was partly down to the extreme tiredness. The first thing that hits you when you step out of the Metro Center is the smell, the smell of coke and sulphur and other nasties from the chemical plants and steelworks on the northern side of the city. Then the quietness hits you, which is even more surreal. You're downtown in a large city and there is almost no traffic, and almost no people, even on a sunny Sunday. Despite Gary's reputation as a violent city (it was named 'murder capital of the country' at some point), I felt totally at ease in the downtown area along Broadway simply because there was nobody there. Granted I wouldn't want to get lost in the suburbs, but there is so few people around I felt fine.
Of course the first place we visited was Gary's most famous ruin, and probably one of the most recognisable abandoned buildings in the whole of the USA, the City Methodist Church. It was founded in 1925 and prospered until the period of 'white flight' began and the predominantly white congregation deserted the city. It closed it's doors for good in 1975 and the church part has been vacant ever since, although a local university used part of the attached hall until the 1990s when the roof was destroyed by a fire. At the time of my visit, a small section of the roof of the church had very recently collapsed into the building, and shortly afterwards more of the roof was removed to enable filming of a big Hollywood film that I can't remember the name of.
The Parry-Shaw Apartments were the next stop, a short walk from City Methodist. A large apartment building constructed to house workers at the steel plant, it too has been empty for decades. We only had a quick look around in here and I only took a handful of photos.
The Gary Public Schools Memorial Auditorium was built as a large auditorium for hosting shows and plays and all sorts by schools in the city, it was one of the largest theatres in the city and the building, which had been closed for some time, was sadly one of the victims of the so-called 'Great Gary Arson' of 1998 where something like a dozen buildings in the downtown area were set on fire in one night. Because of the fire, the auditorium part was demolished leaving only the monolithic lobby standing.
Gary Post Office was somewhere I was very much looking forward to seeing. The imposing Art Deco building was opened in 1936, and it closed like so much else in the 1970s due to the changing demographics of the city and the collapse in employment. It's a beautiful example of American Art Deco architecture, and with marble walls surrounding the base of the building you could see just how opulent it would have been when it was built and the city was thriving.
The final large building we visited was also one of the most sketchy places I've ever been. The Ambassador Apartments building was a grand, beautiful high-rise building constructed in 1928 in a lavish ornate style aimed at the more well-off residents. After the period of decline began in the 1960s, the rich residents moved away from the city and it was converted into low-income housing. By the dawn of the 1970s the building hadn't been maintained in nearly a decade and was falling apart, however it was finally condemned on safety grounds in 1985 and the last residents forced to move out. The decay inside here was alarming, catastrophic water damage had ripped through the building from the top down unchecked for years, leading to some of the cinderblock walls quite literally dissolving. Large sections of the exterior brickwork and masonry had fallen away into the street and of the three staircases in the building, all were missing sections which had collapsed. The dangerously unstable building was finally demolished in 2015 after local officials had put up with the threat of it collapsing in on itself long enough.
Whilst wandering back to the train station we chose a residential street running parallel to Broadway, and I snapped a few photos of some of the thousands of abandoned houses in the city. The one major rule when exploring places like Gary, or Detroit, or Chicago for that measure is under no circumstances do you ever, ever explore an abandoned house because you may as well wear a sign that says 'mug me please'.
And thus ended my first adventure in Gary, I got to my friend's house in northern Chicago early that evening and promptly fell into the deepest of deep sleeps after making friends with his cat.
Cheers for looking as always.
Gary was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corp. as a home for it's new steel plant, with the city being named after lawyer Elbert Henry Gary, the founding chairman of the company. Over time it grew into a large city, with the jobs offered by the various steel plants creating a surge in population and the city grew and expanded, reaching it's peak in 1960 with 178,320 residents. Gary's founding industry was to be it's downfall though, as come the rise in cheap imported steel from the early 1960s onwards the city entered a spiral of decline it never recovered from. The growing competitiveness from imported steel resulted in mass layoffs at the steel plants, in 1970 30,000 people were employed at the plant and as of 2015 it had reduced to a little over 5,000 people. These problems were exacerbated by a rapid change in the racial makeup of the city during the latter half of the 20th Century also. In 1930 21% of the city's population was African-American, by the early 2000s this had changed to 84%, with the change amplified by so-called 'white flight' after the steel plant began it's series of redundancies and white families began moving away from the declining city into the surrounding suburbs. By 2013 it was estimated that over a third of all homes in Gary were abandoned, and from the peak of it's population in 1960 it's estimated to have fallen by over half to just over 80,000 people.
Because of this, as you can imagine there are a lot of abandoned buildings. Schools, factories, hospitals, apartment blocks, pretty much everything you can think of. Gary is a weird place because you can actually go to City Hall and purchase a license to photograph inside any abandoned city-owned building (pretty much everything except the schools), as the local officials realised that so many people visit Gary just to photograph the abandoned stuff that they may as well try and get a little bit of money from it. Usually most casual photographers don't bother but it's certainly a novel idea and way of getting a little extra cash into a desperately poor city.
I paid my first visit to Gary on my first ever trip to the States. I couldn't quite get a trip to Detroit worked out at that time but I was staying with a friend in Chicago for part of the trip so it'd have been remiss of me to not jump on a train and head to Gary for a little while. The problem was that the visit to Gary was planned to be right at the tail end of a ridiculously manic long weekend of travelling and exploring, so by the time I arrived in Gary early on a Sunday afternoon I was extremely sleep deprived, having been awake since 4.30am Friday morning. The trip had taken me and my buddy from NYC to Albany to Newark, where we'd jumped on a plane to Memphis with a brief stop in Atlanta, and then on another plane up to Chicago all in three days whilst doing explores and stuff in between on zero sleep. By the time I got to the airport in Memphis I honestly don't know how I was still awake, and I can't remember a thing pretty much from the Saturday night onwards. All I can recall is desperately trying to not fall asleep in a blues bar in Memphis, and then somehow getting on a plane. I do however recall the landing at Chicago Midway airport, which is pretty alarming if you've never landed there before. There are houses built pretty much up to the airport fenceline, so it really does look and feel like you're about to crash into a residential area when arriving. I further remember Midway due to the airport workers temporarily misplacing my rucksack which had all of my worldly possessions in it, which wasn't fun. As such we missed our intended train into Gary and had to settle for a slightly later one, but after the panic of not being able to locate my bag I wasn't too concerned about that.
My first steps into Gary were surreal also, but maybe that was partly down to the extreme tiredness. The first thing that hits you when you step out of the Metro Center is the smell, the smell of coke and sulphur and other nasties from the chemical plants and steelworks on the northern side of the city. Then the quietness hits you, which is even more surreal. You're downtown in a large city and there is almost no traffic, and almost no people, even on a sunny Sunday. Despite Gary's reputation as a violent city (it was named 'murder capital of the country' at some point), I felt totally at ease in the downtown area along Broadway simply because there was nobody there. Granted I wouldn't want to get lost in the suburbs, but there is so few people around I felt fine.
Of course the first place we visited was Gary's most famous ruin, and probably one of the most recognisable abandoned buildings in the whole of the USA, the City Methodist Church. It was founded in 1925 and prospered until the period of 'white flight' began and the predominantly white congregation deserted the city. It closed it's doors for good in 1975 and the church part has been vacant ever since, although a local university used part of the attached hall until the 1990s when the roof was destroyed by a fire. At the time of my visit, a small section of the roof of the church had very recently collapsed into the building, and shortly afterwards more of the roof was removed to enable filming of a big Hollywood film that I can't remember the name of.
The Parry-Shaw Apartments were the next stop, a short walk from City Methodist. A large apartment building constructed to house workers at the steel plant, it too has been empty for decades. We only had a quick look around in here and I only took a handful of photos.
The Gary Public Schools Memorial Auditorium was built as a large auditorium for hosting shows and plays and all sorts by schools in the city, it was one of the largest theatres in the city and the building, which had been closed for some time, was sadly one of the victims of the so-called 'Great Gary Arson' of 1998 where something like a dozen buildings in the downtown area were set on fire in one night. Because of the fire, the auditorium part was demolished leaving only the monolithic lobby standing.
Gary Post Office was somewhere I was very much looking forward to seeing. The imposing Art Deco building was opened in 1936, and it closed like so much else in the 1970s due to the changing demographics of the city and the collapse in employment. It's a beautiful example of American Art Deco architecture, and with marble walls surrounding the base of the building you could see just how opulent it would have been when it was built and the city was thriving.
The final large building we visited was also one of the most sketchy places I've ever been. The Ambassador Apartments building was a grand, beautiful high-rise building constructed in 1928 in a lavish ornate style aimed at the more well-off residents. After the period of decline began in the 1960s, the rich residents moved away from the city and it was converted into low-income housing. By the dawn of the 1970s the building hadn't been maintained in nearly a decade and was falling apart, however it was finally condemned on safety grounds in 1985 and the last residents forced to move out. The decay inside here was alarming, catastrophic water damage had ripped through the building from the top down unchecked for years, leading to some of the cinderblock walls quite literally dissolving. Large sections of the exterior brickwork and masonry had fallen away into the street and of the three staircases in the building, all were missing sections which had collapsed. The dangerously unstable building was finally demolished in 2015 after local officials had put up with the threat of it collapsing in on itself long enough.
Whilst wandering back to the train station we chose a residential street running parallel to Broadway, and I snapped a few photos of some of the thousands of abandoned houses in the city. The one major rule when exploring places like Gary, or Detroit, or Chicago for that measure is under no circumstances do you ever, ever explore an abandoned house because you may as well wear a sign that says 'mug me please'.
And thus ended my first adventure in Gary, I got to my friend's house in northern Chicago early that evening and promptly fell into the deepest of deep sleeps after making friends with his cat.
Cheers for looking as always.
why is it more dodgy to explore a house than an industrial ruin ?
