Gary Union Station
Indiana
Gary Union Station opened in nineteen ten, just four years after US Steel founded the entire city of Gary from scratch on the Lake Michigan shoreline. US Steel built Gary as an industrial company town, and the union station was part of that plan, a civic-scale building meant to project permanence and ambition for a city that had not existed a decade earlier. The station served the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the New York Central and at its peak was the arrival point for tens of thousands of steelworkers and their families who migrated to Gary from the American South and from Eastern and Southern Europe to work in the mills.
The station handled passenger traffic until nineteen seventy-one, when Amtrak's creation consolidated rail service and Gary's trains were rerouted. The building fell into decline as Gary itself suffered the consequences of deindustrialization, losing more than half its population between the nineteen sixties and today. The station stands largely vacant, a Beaux-Arts shell in a city that still bears the weight of what happened when the steel mills closed.
