Gary Union Station: A Beaux-Arts Shell

Gary Union Station opened in nineteen ten, just four years after United States Steel planted its planned industrial city on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Designed in the Beaux-Arts style by architect M. A.

Lang using poured concrete scored to resemble stone, it served travelers on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern and Baltimore and Ohio railroads, two trunk lines that made Gary a natural stop between Chicago and the East. At its peak the station handled thousands of passengers moving in and out of a steel city humming at full production. It closed in April of nineteen seventy-one.

Today the ceilings are caving, the windows are gone, and vandals have stripped what the decades did not. Indiana Landmarks has repeatedly listed it among the state's most endangered buildings, and preservationists have been working to bring the station back.