Gary, the Calumet, and the Steel Frontier

In nineteen oh-six, U.S. Steel broke ground on a city from scratch on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

They named it Gary, after Elbert Henry Gary, the company's chairman. Within two decades it had more than fifty thousand residents, and it was quickly becoming one of the most productive steel-making centers on earth. The company had chosen the Calumet lakeshore for the same reason all great industrial sites get chosen: geography.

Deep water for ore boats from Minnesota's Iron Range. Rail lines radiating south and east to every market in America. Flat sandy land with room to build.

The Gary Works of U.S. Steel became the largest integrated steel mill in North America.

At peak, its blast furnaces were consuming two hundred thousand tons of iron ore per month and producing the structural steel that framed American skyscrapers, built American bridges, and armored American warships in two world wars. The Calumet region, spanning the Lake Michigan shoreline of northwestern Indiana and the southern edge of Chicago, was never a single city but a continuous industrial corridor of steel mills, oil refineries, and chemical plants. East Chicago, Hammond, Whiting, and Gary together formed an economy built entirely on heavy manufacturing, and they drew one of the largest African American Great Migration populations outside Chicago itself.

Gary's Black community grew from almost nothing in nineteen oh-six to a majority of the city by the nineteen sixties, and in nineteen sixty-seven, Richard Hatcher became one of the first Black mayors of a major American city. The steel industry began its long decline in the nineteen seventies. Gary lost more than two fifths of its population between nineteen seventy and two thousand.

The mills still operate at reduced capacity. The city still carries the weight of an economy that was built for one thing and never rebuilt for anything else.