Fighting for community regeneration
Gary, Indiana, has been a song lyric, a cultural hub, a stigma, a city to rush past, but now it is poised to revitalize, thanks in part to Notre Dame's School of Architecture.
With the help of Notre Dame's Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative, Gary, Indiana is reclaiming its future. (2 min watch)
Christopher Harris is a fourth-generation resident of Gary, Indiana. He traces his family roots to the Great Migration of African American families from the American South to northern cities like Gary. Stories passed down from his great-grandfather talked about Gary as a great melting pot of cultures, ethnicities, and opportunities. Two generations later, Harris's father remembered Gary as vibrant. He recalled days shopping downtown, evenings spent at the Palace Theatre, parades down Broadway.
But Harris, now the executive director of redevelopment for the city of Gary, doesn't share those memories. The Gary he remembers can't be described as anything resembling vibrant.
“I always was very fascinated as a child, hearing the stories of having such a completely different life experience than my father,” he said. “Within a short period of time, between five to 10 years, downtown was really turned on its head when it came to being a symbol of blight as opposed to a symbol of economic prosperity.”
The rise and fall of the Steel City
Gary, Indiana, was founded in 1906 as a city to support a new plant for U.S. Steel. The steel industry provided jobs for residents and contributed to the city's sizable growth into the 1960s. Gary built a thriving downtown with a main thoroughfare on Broadway that featured shopping, music, and culture. But when manufacturing began moving overseas and the steel industry began to shrink, so did Gary's success. In 1970, U.S. Steel Gary Works employed more than 30,000 individuals, but by 2015, it employed only 5,100, creating a jobs vacuum and community decline.
As people began to flee, looking for jobs and opportunities elsewhere, homes, businesses, and buildings were abandoned and left to fall into disrepair. Meanwhile, the city also experienced crime and disinvestment. It was a perfect recipe for eventual collapse, and one seen across many other Rust Belt cities, said Marianne Cusato, the director of the Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative at Notre Dame's School of Architecture.
“As the steel industry failed, Gary became not just a statistic, but an infamous place,” Cusato said. “It was a city that was designed and built from New York. It was a company town that was established to serve the large industry that was there. And when that industry started to collapse and fail, and when the city started to be reduced in size, the property owners that used to own all of Broadway refused to sell their properties and the city went into disrepair outside of the control of the residents who lived there.”
The story is not unlike that of South Bend after the collapse of the Studebaker Corporation. Or of Detroit once the automobile industry shifted its operations abroad. Many other Midwestern towns experienced dramatic sprawl and then downfall.
While abandoned structures are eye-catching, Gary has many neighborhoods filled with cared-for homes.
Listening, then doing
Since 2021, Notre Dame's Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative (HCR) team has worked with communities throughout northern Indiana and southwest Michigan, many that experienced similar challenges. The selected cities, known as the 100-Mile Coalition for their proximity to Notre Dame's campus, partner with Notre Dame in the hope of gaining leadership and knowledge toward their community regeneration efforts. To date, the initiative has partnered with La Porte, Elkhart, and South Bend in Indiana and Kalamazoo in Michigan. They have recommended restructuring roads, adding mixed-use housing, better connecting neighborhoods to downtown areas, and leaning into riverfronts and multimodal mobility such as pedestrian access.
To make these recommendations, HCR operates as a “think-and-do tank.” The initiative sends groups of faculty, students, and professional teams to the partner cities. There they research what the city once was, they listen to residents, and they try to understand the culture of each community. Only after establishing that input does the team begin to envision and sketch what their community could be.
As a “think-and-do tank,” HCR works closely with teams from their partner cities to chart a course forward.
“A key step of our process is to meet with each community and the public to understand what their aspirations for the future are and their immediate needs are, and what they envision their community could become. We do this by asking questions about daily experiences. What do you do when you go downtown? If you are packing a suitcase to visit Gary, what would be in your suitcase?” Cusato said, noting that responses included a swimsuit to experience Gary's lakeshore, or an empty suitcase for shopping, or nice clothes for a night out. “The experience of how you live in a city and your aspirations for how you want to live in a city will help us design a physical place that can be created for you. So it was essential to ask experiential questions.”
It was also essential to listen to the frustrations of residents, she said. On the first community engagement night during the design charrette, Cusato and Harris stood in a room packed with Gary residents. Many came loaded with decades of frustration, skepticism, and questions.
“We just said: ‘We will stand here until every single question is answered,’” Cusato said. And they did. For four hours they listened. And by listening, they gained trust. And with trust, they got the go-ahead to start planning.
“The city of Gary has a stigma that does not represent who the people are living there today. It's been a tremendous privilege and honor to be able to be a small part of their story, to listen to what they need, listen to their hopes and their dreams, and to offer a plan that articulates the vision of the community,” Cusato said.
Drawing a vision forward
Once the HCR team had a sense of what Gary is and what its residents hoped it could be, they had to chart a course forward. To do that, they first had to look back at what made Gary, Gary.
“In a place like Gary that has lost so much of its historic-fabric buildings and so many of its iconic buildings, we draw from the essence of what was there to create an identity that is uniquely Gary,” Cusato said. “That requires looking into what was lost, but also reaching for a future. We can't just recreate brick by brick. The buildings that were lost are not going to be rebuilt into grand department stores and theaters again. The living needs of today have changed. Every great city must evolve to meet the needs of their moment and prepare for its changes.”
For the future of Gary, the HCR team listened to the community's request to return to a walkable and compact city. To do so, the focus was on regenerating the downtown corridor to attract people and businesses and to stabilize two neighborhoods. The lengthy vision includes historic preservation, blight reversal, zoning reform, street redesign, urban interventions, architectural design standards, and pre-approved building plans. The detailed study offers a long-term roadmap to a renewed Gary. That transformation cannot be accomplished overnight, but can be started immediately.
Part of the momentum for radical change is a result of the efforts of Gary's mayor, Eddie Melton. Melton is a native of Gary who experienced firsthand the poverty and gang violence that has long plagued the city. Before he became mayor in January 2024, he served in the Indiana State Senate where he championed transformative opportunities for Gary. Now, he has aspirations for Gary to become a safe, clean, thriving city, where his residents are proud to live.
“This is our moment to truly transform and turn the story around,” Melton said. “I tell folks all the time: This is going to be the greatest comeback story in American urban history.”
But a comeback must be more than a dream. Cusato said that part of Notre Dame's strength in engaging in a partnership with the city is that the HCR team doesn't just draw master plans and run, but continues to advise on positive paths forward.
“Our reconstruction cannot just focus on the vision. We continue beyond visioning with an implementation strategy and on giving advice that helps cities such as Gary to achieve their regeneration goals.”
The future of Gary, Indiana
Harris tells stories of building Gary with his Lego sets as a child. He has been dreaming of Gary's future for as long as he can remember. Now, it has potential to be Gary's present.
“What I hope to see for our downtown is a walkable, vibrant community. A space where you see life unfolding in daily activity spaces where you see people gathering, where you see joy, where you can feel a proud sense of place depicted in postcards and photographs that represent our community well, that we can all be proud of,” he said. “Spaces where people can gather and generate new and positive memories is probably the best vision that I could hope for downtown.”
He believes it will happen. He believes that Notre Dame's partnership helped the city come together around a shared vision, a goal, a way forward.
“I think the Notre Dame School of Architecture helped our community think positively and become committed to a vision in such a way that they could be a part of their downtown's growth,” Harris said. “When our final recommendations were shared with the public, there was a resounding round of applause because there was a moment where we felt like we got it right, that the Notre Dame School of Architecture was able to listen in a way that they felt their voices were heard.”
Harris believes the city is poised to flourish, in large part because the people of Gary believe in it. And they are prepared to fight for it.
“The people that are here that have remained, they really care for the community that they live in,” Harris said. “We're so resilient that despite it all, we know what value Gary can offer to the future of not only our region in Indiana, but also to the nation. We're a special place and we're worthy of being invested in.”
The What Would You Fight For? campaign is supported in part by a generous gift from David and Debra Delahanty.