Economic Forces

An April 1984 F4 tornado tears through Mannford, OK

 I grew up in a dead town. We all thought it was dying, but having been back once a decade or so since Old Man and Momma Jones took down the shingle and meandered us westward; I can see it was dead when the water slide closed down. Those left either never wanted to be in town anyway, or stumble around zombie-fied recalling the last time the Pirates made a run at the Oklahoma State 1A High-School championship, as a measure of persistent relevance.

They mean football, but no team had been to state in anything except marching band for decades. Held together with sludge leftovers of the oil boom, the original town site flooded by a Corps of Engineers dam on the Arkansas river west of Tulsa. The ground so polluted, in a pre-EPA America even, recourse was burial at minimum 15 feet underwater. I thought of it as a suburban experience, since Old Man Jones commuted to Tulsa. Later I met true suburbanites and learned the equine facilities in our back pasture, let alone the back pasture, disqualified me from the normal perception of suburban. Sparse population-density tends a balance that keeps most of the residential and commercial space occupied, each spring tornado season erases another swath of town, only the necessary buildings get recreated.

Inside Gary's Union Station

 This was never an economic hub, like the refinery town where my grandparents lived. Though it still had some vibrance and character when I was young, the brick-streets of Ponca City continue to deteriorate and remain underfunded now that I'm, ahem, less young. As time wears on the sheen fades, and facades begin to dull.

 The Continental Oil Company didn't hold a candle to the United States Steel Corporation's testament to civilization plotted out of northwest Indiana. Named in honor of their founder Elbert Henry Gary, a capitalist mogul of the first order, having coordinated the likes of JP Morgan, A. Carnegie, and C. Schwab to launch the steel company and the city where its labor force would flourish.

Union Station, Gary, Indiana, where the trains no longer so much as slow down

 

Stairs leading to the school within City Methodist

 Gary, Indiana boomed over half a century, before the profit system found a path of lesser resistance. Outsourcing domestic work to nations with cheaper labor increased dividends.

As the company amasses a greater fortune for it's stockholders, the landmarks of the company town now ruin in silent squalor. Broken; economically through the actions, in-actions, and deceptions of greed-fueled corporate minds, and politicians oblivious to the vanishing tax-base and declining median net-worth; by exposure to nature from years of inattention; by malicious and inattentive vandals who've run amok in the ruins leaving a wake of destroyed fixtures, labyrinthine sections cordoned by scavenged plywood and re-purposed plaster-backing steel mesh, spray-painted 'tags' covering most every surface,  and vast quantities of litter. Empty liquor containers, salty snack bags, and the shrink-wrap of fresh art supplies, the most legible labels in the mess. Layers below the surface were ruined beyond recognition. 

The iconic City Methodist Church is now deeded to the city, wasting away exposed to the elements, and the occasional movie crew. It's grandeur cannot be masked

The Ambassador Apartments once symbolized luxury

 A city once of more than 200,000 now a town depleted to less than a quarter that. Second only to Detroit in derelict properties in the rust belt. The magnificent facades, dulled here long ago, now give way to collapse. Bit by bit, falling onto the broken sidewalks and littered courtyards below.
  Historic architecture  -  once-majestic theaters, government services, hotels, places of worship, educational institutions, and residences chink and crumble under the weight of time and climate and disinterest. Exploited by the stresses of greed, opportunities wasted like the town's fortunes, these buildings wither through the ages as residents move on. The money to remove these structures is not available, and the town built on the slag-pile of the US Steel Co. is an unlikely candidate for renaissance. Though Forbes has consistently rated it a great place to invest, and the citizens are alive and thriving.

Today the Ambassador's facade is humbled though its beauty is retained

  It has been a hectic holiday season, to explain the hiatus; not to mention the Jones Data Center has required massive upgrades to support the engrossing subject matter we've found in Gary and the growing popularity of Jezebel's work. Your dutiful sherpa will continue to bring regular installments again now that we're back online. We'll be revisiting tales and sites of Gary for awhile. Diving deeper into various parts of the town and it's history, and sharing the imagery captured as we explored this town that was a city. The opportunities are so incredible, awesome, vast - they seem inexhaustible.

A local explorer we met tells us the mounds of clothes were collected under the guise of a charity but have been abandoned as the validity of the non-profit's claim clouded under investigation.

 Gary prospered as US Steel boomed, related industries sprouted factories around town and available services grew to support the growing workforce(s). Abandoned railroad beds service cement foundations and decrepit factories today. Where steel was once manipulated from a raw material into consumer products and carrying scars of re-use since it's peak as well. 

Whether broken out by vandals or the elements, the breached perimeter undermines the Screw & Bolt Division. Erected by an army of men, the basic elements - water, wind, extreme temperatures, the constant forces of nature reclaim the leftovers of transitory beings.

Looking out at a walkway between building of the factory complex. Kegs of screws & bolts are heavy, the freight elevator below was behind the above photograph and presented a lesson in mechanical history.

The remains of a bolt keg splintered in the ruins

 Many areas await further exploration, and Gigabytes of images are in review as we speak.

Union Station's Grand Hall

Much of downtown Gary burned in the fall of 1997. Random fires in residences and sections of abandoned buildings have scorched many of the remaining buildings.

Through the front door of an abandoned house gutted by fire

Scorched window frame above the Ambassador's front entrance

A desolate house in Midtown

The Knights of Columbus building viewed from the corner apartment atop the Ambassador's south wing

As population and property taxes dwindled, many schools were shut down

  Buildings torn open by fire, exposure, vandalism, that show no recent attempts to secure them from curious nor malevolent passerby. Signs of life litter the apartment buildings, an obvious place to seek shelter from the punishing winters that blow down from Canada drawing moisture from the Great Lake Michigan and pummeling it's south-eastern shore annually. The Ambassador Apartments, built to house the management ranks of the Steel Works, was to be renovated in 2005 to provide low-income housing alternatives. Shortly after the groundbreaking, the company undertaking the task proved unable to achieve the goal.

  As often the trail to abandonment seldom jumps directly to empty space. Spaces are re purposed as rental costs decline. This shuttered Home Furnishing & Accessories shop made a life in what appears to have been a drive through stop for petrol, or liquor, or perhaps both, at points in its life.

Nature boasts its superiority at every opportunity. The TV series 'Life After People' filmed segments in Gary to illustrate the reclamation theory for its viewers.

Administrative spaces that remain unmolested have only the lead armor provided by yesteryear's paint compounds to thank. The tensile strength of this lead coating now breached by time, it peels away. An  intriguing randomness that captivates the eye and spurs the imagination more intensely than clouds might ever hope.

The patriotic essence seeps through this corner in the abandoned Post Office.


















  Inside the postal services inner sanctum behind the marble walls of their steel-grey curtain, one feels interloper personified.

Moreso than enjoying a fireside sunrise from someone's former living room,

or watching the sunset through the ghosts of walls, overlooking a depressed city waning as the light.

Homes left to rot, re-used again by homeless and transients seeking shelter. Lacking utilities, open fires present a great risk to the few structures not scarred by flames

Amongst the twisted mesh of collapsing ceiling in Union Station

Empty spaces don't stay empty long, sleeping bags, discarded clothes, an old bible, an eclectic collection of things one finds along the way.

Several flights up within City Methodist there is a gym, mostly open to the sun it's a veritable garden now

Icicles hang from the rafters in the shipping yards of the Screw & Bolt factory

Drawers of hand-written and typed paperwork, surely in triplicate, once denoting the robust business accomplishments of the factory, and its workforce, lie rotting and waterlogged in a basement office bearing signs of repetitive flood. 

Just across the hall from this privy, luxuriously equipped for any necessity.

Shipment manifests and rail bills-of-lading, neatly organized and maintained in the fulfillment area. Stacked chronologically, a dixie cup of early 70s vintage sits on the upper left corner of this podium. Every "TPS Report"* that passed through this place now left behind, no signs of a final tally or reconciliation in sight. In a storage room on the next level we found computer printouts began circa 1980, as discarded yet technologically superior, I suppose.

The Gym doors with rusted screens that once protected glass from errant basketballs.

Trying to capture the remains of a 7th floor bathroom near dusk. Though I'd not seen a soul as I composed the shot, two cars pass below during this 30 sec exposure to remind me Gary is not wholly abandoned, just downsized

With dwindling resources and population, many abandoned spaces in Gary echo the sentiment of the tagger who visited Union Station.

While passing the town salvage yard, the stark image of a patrol car pushed into a corner of the junkyard couldn't be passed without grabbing a photo.

The one site in town where we found an invested party, taking photos of the salvage yard led to a prompt inquiry from the friendly fellow working the yard. He spent some time detailing history and names of locations that stood out on our Google Earth recon, once he'd confirmed we weren't casing the joint for Crown Vic parts

Exposed to the elements, this shower room resembles a skating rink, but with edgier decor

Corrugated ceilings buckle under the stress of the climate. Water penetrates the breach. Icicles form, reflecting the colors around the shower room like a prism.

'The Old Soap Factory' as a curious local we talked with describes it.

Probes toward entering the soap factory were parried by nature, this trip

Hints of lost grandeur peek through inside Union Station

Lost by an over-extended flock of faithful, City Methodist endures ruination while politicians wring their hands and collect stiff fees for video permits. Hollywood stops through from time to time, the 2009 Nightmare on Elm Street re-make shot here

As did the certain hit, Transformers 3. Anything worth making three times, must be great film, :)


















 Signs of life proliferate Gary, amongst and around the signs of grander lives that have passed from this city. Leaving behind a town with a glutton of derelict properties and no means to maintain nor destroy them. The buildings return to nature, paced to her liking.

This Dodge & Plymouth dealership invites exploration through many open doors

The people in Gary are hearty, saving themselves

 The people we've met are the true reason we'll continue to explore Gary with zeal. They are lively, good humored, proverbial salt-o-the-earth types, and every excursion across the state line leads to engagements with more vibrant, cordial souls finding their contented way amongst the devastated successes of past generations.

Although Pirelli is fond of any story that casts aspersions on corporate power and greed, the people of today's Gary are a testament to the resilience and tenacity of the human spirit.


 We're enthralled to have such access into this town, and it's truthfully the motivation that drove us to launch this blog and showcase the sights we've found seeking out the less populated, past-their-prime locations that have fallen into the unstructured existence of abandonment in the Rust Belt.



While it's numbers don't look so good "on paper" the city of Gary is very much alive.

Despite and among the gloriously ruining landmarks of commerce and capitalism.

Until next time, stay off the radar!

* TPS Report - Adopted from usage in Mike Judge's Office Space where it served a comedic device to accounting as the widget to manufacturing. If you're not familiar, I urge you to catch the flick.

Other resources, Panorama views of First Methodist Church by Richard Drew on 360cities.com;
http://www.360cities.net/image/21st-century-charter-school-at-gary-indiana-usa