Gary, Indiana: Steel City, Birthplace of the Jacksons

The city you are passing through was built in less than two years, from nothing, by corporate decree. In March of nineteen oh six, the United States Steel Corporation broke ground on an empty stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline thirty miles east of Chicago. They needed a site at the midpoint between iron ore coming down from Minnesota and coal coming up from the south, and they needed navigable water. This patch of dune and swamp had all of it. Within months, workers were arriving by the thousands, and a city was taking shape out of raw sand.

The corporation named it Gary, after Elbert Henry Gary, the chairman of United States Steel and one of its founders alongside J. P. Morgan. Gary Works, the steel plant that was the whole reason for the city's existence, became for a time the largest steel mill complex in North America. At its peak the plant employed tens of thousands of workers and the city around it had a population approaching two hundred thousand.

Workers came from across Europe and from the American South during the Great Migration, including a large Black community that built churches, businesses, and schools in the city's neighborhoods. In nineteen sixty-four, a crane operator named Joe Jackson who played blues guitar in local clubs was raising five sons in a small house on Jackson Street, and those sons were forming a singing group. Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael began performing as the Jackson Five, won a local talent show, and were eventually signed to Motown. Michael Jackson was born here in nineteen fifty-eight.

The steel collapse of the nineteen seventies hit Gary as hard as anywhere in the Rust Belt. United States Steel shed tens of thousands of jobs. Residents left. Tax revenue collapsed. The city that industry had conjured out of sand in two years spent the next fifty years slowly hollowing out.