Gary, the Most American of All American Cities

Introduction: “Built as It Is on Shifting Sand”

1 An amazing feature of Gary, built as it is on shifting sands, is that it is actually so solid, so permanent, so strong. There is nothing suggestive of the shoddy or the temporary. Schools, libraries, clubs, commercial buildings, homes, churches, meeting places, all have the aspect as of having been built for permanence. The city has arisen so swiftly, so solidly, just because a great corporation ordered it! It is vastly more of an achievement than as if it had been ordered by an arbitrary monarch, with absolute control of a nation and of its resources. Robert Shackleton, The Book of Chicago, 1920 The story of Gary, Indiana, has been told in many ways. When U.S. Steel finished building its newest steel production center in 1909, the corporation named the city after its chairman, Judge Elbert H. Gary. Because the companyhadseeminglyconjuredthecityanditsmill(orperhapsthemill anditscity,becauseitisthisveryrelationshipthatwoulddeterminemuch about Gary) out of thin air in only three years, the firing of the hearths in Garypromptedacelebrationofthecity’stechnologicalachievements,the continued march of progress, and the audaciousness of American industry . The business magazine Survey noted that “accustomed as Americans of this day are to rapid accomplishment, not one who visits the suddenly created town of Gary . . . fails to experience a new thrill of achievement.” As the fanfare continued, boosters for the city proclaimed Gary the “city of the century,” a moniker that soon graced all of the city’s promotional literature and official letterhead. “This is not the age of magicians, we are told,” concluded Elliott Flower of Putnam’s Magazine, “and yet, judged Introduction “Built as It Is on Shifting Sand” 2 · Introduction by ordinary standards, the building of the city . . . must be regarded as something very close to magic.” Likewise, the Independent proclaimed that “in Gary we see the so-called trust at its best. The old order is passing away. Man, the conqueror, and man, the liberator, takes on new dignity and glory as man, the creator.”1 For its part U.S. Steel seemed to embrace its role in the momentous construction. It orchestrated the pageantry of the mill’s opening including the arrival, amid blowing whistles, ringing bells, and firing cannons, of the first shipment of iron ore aboard the lake freighter Elbert H. Gary. Many within the crowd of thousands scrambled to collect pieces of iron ore as mementos. Likewise, in January 1909, Mary Louise Gleason, the daughterofSuperintendentWilliamPalmerGleason,litthefirstblastfurnace .Inadditiontotheseopeningceremonies,thecompanyalsodetailed every step of the construction with photographs. Images depict what the sand dunes of the Indiana shore looked like before construction began. Each new building was carefully documented and juxtaposed against empty spaces from a couple of years earlier. Urban amenities such as the sewer system and the streetcar also received photographic attention. But the bulk of the photography of Gary’s construction was reserved for the building of the steel works. Here was industrial modernity at its finest. Huge structures, massive construction machines, rail lines, ship slips, blast furnaces, and towering smokestacks dominated the photography of early Gary. From a sandy wasteland, this was the tabula rasa upon which American capital was to write its greatest success.2 Bythelatetwentiethcentury,however,mentionofGarywouldmean something quite different. For many, Gary was the city one saw (and passed through) to get to Chicago. It became part of the inconvenience and excitement of journeying into the Windy City. It offered the traveler headingwestontheIndianaTollRoadthefirstconfirmationofurbanism and served, with its smokestacks, industries, and decaying buildings, as a clear juxtaposition to the glittering wealth of Chicago’s downtown. In his prologue to Nature’s Metropolis, historian William Cronon describes just such a journey through the city. “The city announced itself to our noses before we ever saw it,” Cronon says of his childhood trips to Chicago, “and we always pressed our faces against the windows to locate the sweet pungent odor that was Gary. (Gary and Chicago blend in my child’s eye view as a single place, united in a child’s mythic name: The City).”3 Gary “Built as It Is on Shifting Sa nd” · 3 became something both attached to Chicago and a place to be passed through on the way to Chicago. Such a view of the Indiana Toll Road as an entrance into Chicago or a quick path through the wasteland would have surprised midcentury residents of the steel city. Indeed, the Eisenhower years had been very good to U.S. Steel and its Indiana fiefdom. By midcentury the...