Although it’s home to the second-most annual murders per 10,000 residents of any city in the United States1, Gary, Indiana, has made strides to overcome its national reputation as a dangerous place over the past few decades. Case in point: it used to be ranked first2! Despite its perceived standing, visitors brave enough to check out the area of Broadway between Fourth and Fifth Avenues will find a sweet old courthouse in the middle of a downtown that’s slowly on the upswing3.
Anyone from Indiana is familiar with the story of Gary, the city whose fortunes rose and fell with those of the steel industry. In 1950, Gary’s population was 133,911, more than a third of Lake County’s population of 368,152. To contrast, 69,093 people lived in Gary in 2020, just 14% of Lake County’s 498,700. The difference is due to white flight- scads of people fled the city for the suburbs, leaving abandoned schools, hotels, civic properties, and businesses in a state of abandonment and destruction. Just over a hundred years after it was founded, the story of “The City of the Century4” has turned out to be a tragedy.
Gary isn’t the seat of Lake County. That honor falls to Crown Point, where work began on a monumental courthouse that officials hoped would serve as a long-term home for the county’s offices and courts in the late 1870s. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out that way: although Crown Point’s new courthouse was finished in 1880, the ensuing decades brought stratospheric growth to a different town seventeen miles northwest. By 1890, the meatpacking industry had rendered Hammond nearly three times the size of Crown Point, and a superior courthouse was built there in 19035.
Hammond wasn’t the only city in Lake County to experience a population explosion. In 1906, The United States Steel Corporation chose a location nearby as the site of its enormous new plant and established a factory town around it. Both the plant and the town were named after Elbert Henry Gary, U.S. Steel’s founding chairman. By 1930, more than 100,000 people called Gary home. The place dwarfed Crown Point and Hammond by a wide margin, so county officials decided to build another superior courthouse there.
Gary’s Lake County Superior Courthouse was completed in 1929, along with a nearly-identical city hall and Gateway Park. The structures were all part of Gary’s new, city-beautiful design, and the park even featured two reflecting pools to show off the buildings’ gold-colored domes6. Throngs of steelworkers and their families finally had a convenient courthouse worthy of doing business in.
The superior courthouse in Gary rises three stories tall and is topped by a central saucer dome on an octagonal drum with square windows. Doric columns in antis, or in line with the building’s walls, feature prominently across its northern face. The City Hall is slightly different, featuring flanking wings with stepped parapets and a square drum below its shallow dome.
Both buildings were designed by J.T. Hutton, who designed Lake County’s earlier superior courthouse in Hammond. In the years since they were first built, original entrances were removed from the city hall and courthouse, while anthemions -patterns of radiating petals- were removed from the courthouse just above its second story7. Despite the changes, a banded laurel-and-eagle motif survives just below the roofline of the courthouse, and four carved urn patterns continue to project from between central windows of the building’s third-story.
The south side of the courthouse shares greenspace with the Genesis Convention Center, a dilapidated arena that once hosted a pair of minor league basketball teams. A three-story monument designed by Chicago artist Omri Amrany called Fusion stands there to celebrate Gary’s centennial. A mix of bronze, granite, glass, and steel, the installation uses the symbology of a 30-ton U.S. Steel ladle, two 9-foot bronze steelworkers, 50 pieces of cast glass flames, and granite butterflies to represent the city’s rebirth. Assembled in 20068, the sculpture is breathtaking.
Although I took two trips to Gary as part of my project to document all of Indiana’s courthouses, both journeys were laser-focused on the task at hand. I had enough time to linger and snap pictures of well-known abandoned sites like City Methodist, the Palace Theater, Gilroy Field, and Memorial Auditorium, but it didn’t seem fair to cynically document Gary’s misfortune. Although it’s a doppelgänger of City Hall across the street, the classic courthouse represents Gary’s former glory, its current state, and the city’s promise all in one.
TL;DR
Lake County (pop.491,456, 2/92)
Gary (pop. 78,450)
Built: 1929
Cost: $1,000,000 ($14 million in 2016)
Architect: J.T. Hutton
Style: Neoclassical
Courthouse Square: No square
Height: 88 feet
Current Use: Some government offices and courts
Photographed: 3/19/16.
Sources Cited
1 Is Gary, Indiana Safe To Visit? (Crime Rates And Crime Stats) (2023). Van Life Wanderer. Web. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
2 “The 30 cities with the highest murder rates in the US” madison.com. Lee Enterprises, Inc. April 15, 2019. Web. Retrieved 8/31/19.
3 “Demolition of Gary’s Sheraton Hotel Almost Complete” CBS Chicago. October 14, 2014. Web. Retrieved 8/31/19.
4 Lane, J. (1978). City of the Century. Indiana University Press [Bloomington]. Book.
5 Enyart, David. “Lake County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2019. Web. Retrieved August 31, 2019
6 National Register of Historic Places, Gary City Center Historic District, Gary, Lake County, Indiana, National Register # 94001352
7 (See footnote 6).
8 jaholst. “Fusion Sculpture – Gary, Indiana” Enchanted America. August 12, 2014. Web. Retrieved August 31, 2019.
That city is a mystery to me. You would think that a place in low-tax Indiana that is a convenient commute from Chicago would be booming. But no.