City plans new train station, offices and apartments to draw residents back
GARY, Ind. — In the coming weeks, Gary officials plan to demolish the former Gordon’s Department Store with explosives. The store was a center of commerce for decades before it closed as the local economy declined in the 1970s, and it has sat vacant since. The detonation is part of an $80 million blight elimination campaign targeting 7,000 abandoned homes and businesses. City plans also call for flattening a downtown convention center, a church and several nearby buildings.
Mayor Eddie Melton said demolishing the vacant buildings is necessary to spark construction and investment in the city core. Officials and developers are planning to build a new train station, offices and apartments downtown, with the aim of drawing people and commerce back to the center. Part of the plan includes refurbishing homes and building new ones in dormant neighborhoods. “We have to make way for the future,” Melton told city residents during a recent presentation of the demolition plans, sparking applause.
Gary was founded in 1906 as a company town for U.S. Steel, created by the banker J.P. Morgan through a megamerger, and named after U.S. Steel’s then-chairman, Elbert Henry Gary, who never lived there. The city grew rapidly through the 1920s, struggled during the Great Depression and recovered during and after World War II. In the 1970s and 1980s, competition from foreign and lower-cost steel producers cost thousands of steelworkers their jobs. Unemployment reached double digits, residents left in large numbers, and vacant stores and banks spread along Broadway while thousands of houses sat empty around town. Stefanos Polyzoides, a University of Notre Dame architect helping lead redevelopment plans, describes the city center as suffering “Hiroshima-scale abandonment.”
The decline has slowed in recent years. Gary’s population fell by about 2.6% from 2020 to 2025, census data show, and violent crime and homicides have dropped. Median household income is $38,731, about half Indiana’s median of $71,957, and roughly a third of residents live below the poverty line, compared with 12% statewide.
The campaign follows large blight elimination efforts in other Rust Belt cities, including Detroit and South Bend, that have had varying degrees of success. After Melton took office in 2024, he said he sought advice from Detroit’s then-mayor, Mike Duggan, who had helped revitalize his city by eliminating blighted buildings and curbing population loss. Duggan’s first counsel, Melton recalled, was to repair broken streetlights and pockmarked roads — changes residents would see and appreciate immediately. Melton said he quickly fixed nearly 1,000 broken streetlights and doubled the city’s spending on paving.
Melton has expanded the blight campaign using state and city funds plus a $3 million grant from the Hard Rock Casino, which opened on Gary’s outskirts in 2021. He said it pains him to raze the downtown convention center, built in 1981 as the creation of the city’s first Black mayor, Richard Hatcher, but the building has been vacant for years, damaged by fire and vandals.
New investment is arriving alongside the demolition work. U.S. Steel, recently acquired by Japan’s Nippon Steel, has begun investing $950 million to upgrade its Gary mill, which employs about 4,300 people and remains the city’s largest employer despite years of downsizing. The company has pledged to restart a tin mill at the site that will employ 225 workers. FedEx next year plans to open a 300,000-square-foot distribution center that the city says will create 600 jobs.
At the neighborhood level, demolition work has been underway for years. About seven years ago, Jim Wiseman rallied his construction company, Rieth-Riley, and others in the community to donate excavators and crews. The group has since knocked down 115 blighted homes, helping trigger new construction and renovations on those blocks. Tearing down the vacant houses “sparked a new energy and sense of pride,” said Wiseman, who grew up in the Aetna neighborhood and lives in nearby Portage, Ind. “It was like a chain reaction.”
Residents point to changes they can see. Jamillah Taylor, 54, recently bought a refurbished three-bedroom ranch house in Gary for $146,000; it was dilapidated before an out-of-state house flipper fixed it up, she said. Taylor, who makes about $63,000 a year working nights at a hospital as a patient-care technician, said she passed on a house in the southern part of town that was surrounded by vacant properties. “My sister was like, ‘No, this is not a neighborhood!’” Taylor said. The house she bought sits next to one vacant property, but the rest of the block is lively and well maintained, with neighbors who work in the mills or commute to Chicago about an hour away. “There are people here, they are thriving, they are working in the mills,” Taylor said.
SaDon Long, a 54-year-old marketing consultant who has lived in Aetna all his life, said he can feel the improvement over the past five years. “It’s a lot brighter. People feel a lot safer,” Long said outside his brick house, near several recently renovated homes. “You see more people outside than you’ve probably seen since the 80s.”
Home builder David Sutor, who moved to Gary from Chicago a few years ago, has rehabbed seven dilapidated homes around the city and purchased 20 empty lots for new construction. He was putting the finishing touches on a four-bedroom house along 10th Street that a local buyer purchased for $273,000. “When you drive around, the opportunity just screams at you. If you’re not afraid of the grunt work or the grit, the possibilities are just endless,” Sutor said.
Downtown and the adjacent Midtown neighborhood have seen less change, and the city is concentrating its redevelopment plans there. Gary tapped architects from the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, to help draft designs for a new train station on the rail line to Chicago, which the state is partly financing through $90 million in matching funds. The transit hub would connect the city center to a biking and hiking trail along a 60-mile stretch of lakefront. The architects also drafted housing blueprints for vacant lots that any builder can use, and proposed renovating two existing buildings and developing three new ones for apartments, commercial and office space at Fifth Avenue and Broadway.
Melton said developers have expressed interest in some of the buildings, and he described the Fifth and Broadway corner as critical to the city’s future. “We have to show the market that the city is able to sustain itself and prop itself up economically,” he said. “This intersection right here is going to be very critical.”