‘Turning the Titanic’ in a Rust Belt City

It was dark when I drove into Gary, Ind., one afternoon last November and parked next to the city’s tallest building, a 10-story office tower about a block from City Hall. I had an appointment with Chuck Hughes, the CEO of the Gary Chamber of Commerce. He warned me that the front door might be locked, and that if it was I should call him so he could have the security guard buzz me in. But the door wasn’t locked. In fact, it was propped open.

I walked past the guard and called Hughes while I was wandering around the stairwell looking for his office. When he picked up, I heard his voice once through the receiver and then again, strangely echoing down the empty hallways a couple floors above me.

Downtown Gary is like that: underpopulated, permeable.

It’s no secret that Gary is a poster city for deindustrialization and abandonment. U.S. Steel founded Gary in 1906. When the company grew the city grew; when the company shrank, starting in the mid-20th century, the city shrank. It has never recovered. This is what most people know about Gary, if they know anything about it at all.

The concentration of vacant buildings in and around downtown Gary is profound. City Hall sits at the northern tip of Broadway, just across a highway and a pair of railroad tracks from U.S. Steel. Large public buildings in various states of disuse surround it to the east and west. Directly across a long lawn to its south is a tall building with all of its windows punched out. For five straight miles down Broadway to the city limit, the level of dereliction rises and falls on a gradient from partial to absolute. Some parts of the sprawling city are lively and well-populated, like the Miller Beach area near Indiana Dunes National Park. But the downtown core is a place where nothing much happens anymore. The conventional urbanist wisdom says that eyes on the street make a city feel safe. Downtown Gary has gone so far in the other direction that it almost feels safe in its emptiness.

Eddie Melton, a Gary native, former state senator and now mayor, didn’t understand how unusual that was until he went to college, studying business at Kentucky State University. He’s working to build the city back up and challenge the narrative of decline that’s defined it since the mid-20th century. Since becoming mayor in 2024, he has pressed the case, in public presentations and interviews as well as private conversations with lawmakers and business leaders, that Gary is in fact poised for a comeback. He pins his argument to a string of recent economic development wins: the 2021 opening of a new Hard Rock Casino, the expansion of Indiana Sugars that started in 2024, the growth of the Gary/Chicago International Airport, the incremental commercial development of the Miller neighborhood and, for the first time in decades, a major investment in U.S. Steel after its acquisition by the Japanese corporation Nippon.

These are all signs of momentum that have made possible a turnaround narrative for the Rust Belt city. Still, a town that loses three-fifths of its population does not simply “come back.” Gary is 52 square miles, bigger by land area than San Francisco. But all of its residents could fit comfortably together for a San Francisco 49ers game inside Levi’s Stadium.

“I’ve been trying,” Melton says, “to turn the Titanic.”

Building Relationships

Melton has an easy demeanor. Despite having the politician’s knack for staying on message, he is not the kind of person who rushes in to answer a question before it’s been asked. When he gives speeches he shares credit and doesn’t say too much. I’ve heard his style of interacting with people described as “finesse,” “polish,” “je ne sais quoi.” One city council member described him as both “cool” and “warm” in the same sentence.

When he went to work as a young Black Democrat in the Indiana state Senate, which has been run by white Republicans for decades, these personal qualities were not trivial. Melton got his start as a staffer for Earline Rogers, a legendary Gary Democrat who served 34 years in the state legislature. She helped establish the first casinos in Gary in the 1990s. Though the casinos were floating on boats off the shores of Lake Michigan, it was still a major development win for a city that hadn’t had one in years.

After getting elected to the Senate as her successor, Melton authored a bill to move the casinos on to dry, taxable land. He also wrote legislation that put state money into blight elimination in downtown Gary and established a fund for a new transit hub and convention center. Melton thrived in the collegial atmosphere of the state Senate, while building an agenda around economic development goals with bipartisan appeal.

“He was very good at negotiating the waters down there,” says Indiana state Rep. Ragen Hatcher, a former Gary city council member and current director of the Gary Sanitation District. “He wanted to work with everyone. He’s still that way today.”

Melton says he wanted to run for mayor because he’d “seen the previous administration make some bad decisions” and wasn’t confident his efforts in the legislature would pay off at home. Under the previous mayor, Jerome Prince, whom Melton beat in the 2023 Democratic primary, Gary had sold the Genesis Center, a vacant civic arena across from City Hall, to a private developer. But the developer didn’t follow through on its plans to redevelop the property, and the city ended up suing to get it back. When Melton took office, the Genesis Center had been stripped of copper wiring by scrappers. The electricity and water service hadn’t been properly decommissioned. It was, like so many other buildings downtown, a disaster waiting to happen. One of the first things Melton did as mayor was bring in contractors to make the building safe and provide cost estimates for restoring it or demolishing it for future development.

As mayor, Melton has begun to deploy resources he helped allocate as a state senator. He’s launched a blight elimination program with the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority to demolish dangerous buildings downtown. One of the first teardowns was a former barbershop on Broadway where Melton used to get his hair cut. He says the urge to prevent a catastrophe by knocking the building down far outweighed any sense of nostalgia. He’s also worked with the University of Notre Dame on a plan for revitalizing downtown Gary with small-scale redevelopment. In short, he’s laid out a vision for rebuilding the city.

“For anyone to make investments, whether it’s the private sector or state and federal government, they want to know that there’s leadership and a vision,” Melton says. “I don’t know many entities that you could just walk up to and ask for resources and they wouldn’t ask, ‘OK, what’s the plan?’ We can tangibly point to plans for every part of the city right now that weren’t there 10, 15, 20 years ago.”

‘We Were Written Off’

Melton inherits a tradition of Black leadership in Gary that goes back to Richard Hatcher, who was elected mayor on the same day in 1968 as Carl B. Stokes in Cleveland, the first two Black mayors of big U.S. cities. In 1972, Hatcher gave a keynote speech at the National Black Political Convention, a major convening of 8,000 Black political figures from around the country, hosted in Gary despite there being no hotels in the city. (It still has none today, though several are in development near the Hard Rock Casino). The convention was a major turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, bringing together everyone from Muhammad Ali to Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz. Hatcher — whose daughter Ragen is now a state representative and works in Gary City Hall — eschewed the radicalism of Black Power activists drawing attention at the time. But he was an important civil rights figure, traveling with the Rev. Jesse Jackson during his “Rainbow Coalition” presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988.

In 1978, as Hatcher was in his 10th year in office and the city of Gary was seeing the first round of stories about its possible comeback, he gave an interview to the New York Times in which he said that most of the challenges Gary was facing would be impossible to understand if you didn’t take racism into account. After Hatcher was elected, the Indiana state legislature had given special permission to form a new city just to the south called Merrillville, which began drawing much of the remaining white population away from Gary. The city’s population was around 178,000 when Hatcher was elected; it has shrunk to about 69,000 today. The legislature later passed a law allowing U.S. Steel to assess the value of its own properties, which resulted in a substantial cut to the city’s revenues.

“I’m never naive to the fact that race is going to be an underlying issue when it comes to governing,” Melton says. “It makes it even more difficult, because coming from a city that has experienced so much, we have to prove ourselves to ourselves first — that we can make it, we can survive, we can govern, we can sustain. But you also have to prove yourself to the outside.”

Melton’s grandparents moved from Mississippi and Alabama to work in the steel mill. As he grew up, he learned about the diaspora of American steel, its centrality to some of the most important infrastructure and buildings and automobiles built around the world. And he learned about Gary’s artistic and political legacies too, as the home of both the Jackson 5 and one of the first Black mayors of a major U.S. city. But its near-universal reputation was one of unrelieved decline.

“It felt like we were written off, and that’s the part that would get under my skin,” Melton says. “Don’t discredit what we’ve been able to contribute to the world.”

Turnaround Town?

The narrative of Gary’s turnaround is pinned to a string of high-profile projects, some completed and some underway. And Melton has continued to go after big fish. Recently he’s been pitching Gary as the future home for the Chicago Bears, as state legislators work to lure the football team into Northwest Indiana. The city certainly has the land, says Melton, a lifelong Bears fan. Whether or not the stadium proposal gains any momentum, Melton says that merely making the pitch has raised the city’s profile. Lately, he’s been fielding more calls from businesses looking at location decisions.

The turnaround narrative has taken on a life of its own, with national press coverage of the Nippon deal and Gary’s efforts to redevelop parts of the city. In the process, Melton’s reputation has become a bit much for some locals. Chuck Hughes, the Chamber of Commerce CEO and a former member of the city council, refers to him, all but rolling his eyes, as “the wonder boy that turned Gary around.” (Hughes once ran for mayor himself, a campaign that culminated in what he calls “that ill-fated election when the citizens lost.”) But even alongside his barely concealed bitterness, Hughes gives Melton credit for his performance as mayor, saying he’s been a “good steward” of the city’s resources.

For all the flashy economic development projects that Melton has worked to bring to Gary, the small things matter too. In November, Melton attended the grand opening of a Gary outpost of Bob’s Shrimp, a popular takeout spot founded in neighboring Hammond. The store is part of a larger shopping center rising in the Miller section, in a special development district surrounding a train station. More than a dozen restaurants have opened in the area in the last few years, Melton says.

“We don’t take it for granted,” he told a small group of officials and civic leaders gathered for the occasion.

But to attract outside investors, the city needs to improve the quality of life for its current residents. Melton says he’s as focused on keeping all the current residents as he is on inviting new businesses. That means delivering basic services and competent government. Melton notes that Gary has a small budget surplus for the first time in 20 years. He says it’s on track to fix a scourge of broken traffic lights and pave miles of crumbling roads. Still, to do the things that cities need to do to improve — pick up the trash, pave the streets, fix the stoplights, put out fires, keep the peace, secure abandoned buildings and stamp permits, not to mention attracting investment — requires a larger taxpaying population to prop up these services. This Gary does not have. It’s possible to advance some of the city’s priorities on some days. But it’s not possible to advance all of its priorities every day.

“Mayor Melton is doing everything that Mayor Melton can do,” says Ragen Hatcher. “But you can’t just say, ‘We’re going to clean up the city.’ There’s not enough people. There’s not enough money. There’s not enough resources. There’s not enough trucks.”

Just as Gary’s past was shaped by the fortunes of a single company, its future could take any number of turns based on factors outside its control. The Chicago Bears might move to Gary, or they might not. The population might start growing more steadily, or people might start leaving again. Nippon’s investment in the Gary steel plant could reenergize the manufacturing economy, the casino could spur lots of spinoff development, a new convention center could revitalize downtown — any of that might or might not happen. In any event, Melton says the city’s trajectory has shifted, and it’s because of an accumulation of efforts rather than any single move.

“I just wanted to be able to come back, show competent leadership with a vision, and to solve one of the toughest problems in the country,” he says. “It can be done.”

On the afternoon that I met Hughes in his downtown office, he told me that bringing casinos to Gary initially had been a tough sell, because “every other house is a church.” The city is not quite that dense with churches, but they do make up a bigger-than-average share of the urban fabric. I saw lots of churches driving around Gary early in November — big and small churches, new ones and long-abandoned ones. I passed one church next to a taco shop that had a sign with a verse from the book of Corinthians. In most Bibles the verse is translated as, “By the grace of God I am what I am.” St. Francis is said to have reformulated it into the modern idiom, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The rendering in Gary was more to the point: “I'M STILL HERE BY THE GRACE OF GOD.”