Can a company town that’s been called “the most miserable city in America” remake itself?

U.S. Steel mines iron ore in Minnesota and sends it across Lake Superior on freighters a thousand feet long. At Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the ships enter the Soo Locks, which provide passage to the lower Great Lakes. Five hundred billion dollars’ worth of ore (and ninety-five per cent of the United States’ supply) annually moves through the locks, which have been managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1881. The Minnesota ships travel the long, dangling length of Lake Michigan and dock at its southern tip: Gary, Indiana.

Two days after Christmas, a ship called the Presque Isle sat in the slip at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in North America. “Looks like it just came in—it’s riding low,” Daniel Killeen, the vice-president of Gary Works, told Eddie Melton, the mayor of Gary. Melton and I were in a company van, touring the steelyard—eternal mud, crisscrossed with the tire tracks of massive machines. We passed conical piles of raw materials—the plant uses manganese, limestone, sinter, coke—and neat stacks of the finished product, steel slabs. Each slab measures about nine inches thick, six feet wide, and thirty feet long, and can be heated to twenty-four hundred degrees and pressed like pasta dough to make panels that are used in automobile manufacturing. (A top customer is Toyota.) The mill also makes tin and chrome for Campbell’s soup and for various bottlers. “During COVID, the chrome line was just crazy,” Killeen said. “Lysol cans.” Gary Works produces six million tons of steel per year. The chimneys ever churn. One recent night, a russet haze hovered above an enormous flame atop a prominent stack, and a Gary native told me that when he was little his father used to say, “That’s what keeps us warm.” All over town, you can smell the emissions, or not; a steelworker said that locals get used to the stench the way a cook no longer smells his kitchen, or a smoker no longer smells his clothes.

The Mayor, who turned forty-four in January, is built like a college quarterback, which he once was. He had on top-rimmed eyeglasses and a steelworker uniform the color of a traffic cone. The back of his fire-retardant jacket read “USS.” Gary Works’ chief of security and safety, Terry Carter, had issued the workwear to us, along with reinforced boots, hard hats, goggles, earplugs, and white padded gloves that reminded me of the kind worn by cartoon M&M’s. Melton, who grew up in Gary, had not been inside the steel mill since a class field trip in elementary school. He told Killeen, “I remember seeing a slab come in—you just felt that heat come off of it.”

Steel is an alloy: iron plus carbon. It appears throughout the man-made world, in bridges, skyscrapers, railroads, battleships, washing machines, saucepans, scalpels, staples. The U.S.’s ability to mass-produce steel accelerated in 1856, after the invention of a relatively inexpensive purification process, and intensified during the Second World War. U.S. Steel, which is based in Pittsburgh, became the country’s first billion-dollar company. It was founded in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie and others; financed by J. P. Morgan; presided over by Charles Schwab; and supported by John D. Rockefeller, who had the ore deposits. In 1905, U.S. Steel’s inaugural chairman, Elbert H. Gary, announced plans to build “a plant of the most modern standards”—the eponymous factory that Melton was now touring, in the eponymous city that Melton now ran.

At Gary Works, steel is still made the way it always has been. Ore is fed into the top of a bottle-shaped stack, called a blast furnace, whose interior is lined with refractory brick. Vents, or tuyeres, shoot superheated, super-oxygenated air into the bottom of the stack, creating a chemical reaction that liquifies the ore. Every ten to twenty years, a blast furnace must be relined, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Gary Works has been planning to refurbish blast furnace No. 14—“the star of the show,” as one steelworker described it to me—though steelmakers are being urged to abandon blast furnaces (which are traditionally fuelled by coking coal) and to embrace environmentally friendlier options (hydrogen; electric-arc furnaces). A staggering ten per cent of the planet’s carbon-dioxide emissions comes from steel factories. Paradoxically, steel, which is a critical component in electric vehicles and wind turbines, factors into the clean-energy transition.

After ore is melted, it gets poured through the hatch of an immense, space-capsule-looking thing called a submarine ladle, or “sub,” which is then sent down a rail. Killeen took Melton and me to a building marked “Pig Iron Caster No. 1.” We walked through a clanking hangar with corrugated walls, cement floors, and yellow guardrails, and came to the ladle track, below which stood a spouted basin, below which moved a conveyor belt of empty molds, turning on itself like a bicycle chain. The sub eased down the rail, holding a hundred and fifty tons of molten iron. It stopped above the basin. A siren went off. The sub tilted toward us, glacially. An orange glow appeared, and then a flame. A neon bead formed at the lip of the hatch and became an orange stripe and then a deluge. Killeen said, “That is a hundred per cent iron, but it flows exactly like water.”

Seeing iron pour is like watching lava and a fireworks show combined. Embers shot to the floor and fizzled as the torrent passed from basin to mold. A “Star Wars” character—a steelworker dressed head to toe in protective silvers—materialized, poking at the flow with a long stick. The filled molds moved down the line like mutant blister packs of tangerine gum. They passed through cooling water and were eventually flipped like fresh-baked cakes, each now a fifty-pound block, known as a pig. Killeen walked us to the end of the line and picked up a pig that had been there for a while, then passed it to the Mayor, who tested its weight in his hands. Melton is the twenty-second leader of a place that both needs and has been devastated by the industry that created it, and he was thinking about the contours of that.

U.S. Steel laid out Gary in homage to its original home, New York City. The cornerstone streets are Broadway and Fifth Avenue, and the downtown core consists of long rectangular blocks more typical of Manhattan than of the Midwest. Fifth Avenue runs parallel to the lakeshore. Broadway runs perpendicular to Fifth. Domed, neoclassical landmarks—the Lake County courthouse and City Hall—went up on either side of Broadway, forming a sort of city gate.

In 1913, the U.S. Department of Commerce put out a short silent film, selling U.S. Steel as a path to the American Dream. The film opens on a peasant couple summoning their son from a farm field. He sets aside his wheelbarrow to open a handwritten letter: “Ya poslavam peňize, dej pozor a přt hnět, twuj brater,” Czech for “I am sending money, be careful and come right away, your brother.” He packs and kisses his parents goodbye; the next frame reads, “HE ARRIVES IN AMERICA.” At U.S. Steel, the young farmer finds work amid planers, circular saws, emery wheels, belts and pulleys, mega-magnets, giant hooks, and furnaces. Within six years, success. He marries a pretty teacher who shows her students how to write, in English, “I live here.” The couple has a nice house and a son, who attends “THE MODEL SCHOOL.” This refers to the Ralph Waldo Emerson School, where William Wirt, Gary’s first schools superintendent, pioneered the work-study-play system, yielding a universe of public schools with gyms, auditoriums, swimming pools, vocational shops, band, recess, art. “Think about it,” Christopher Harris, Gary’s executive director of redevelopment, told me the other day as we sat outside the original school building, in the back of the Mayor’s chauffeured car. “You had this new, twentieth-century city that was being built by U.S. Steel. How could you not have the most innovative educational system for all these new workers and immigrants?”

Neighborhoods filled in around Broadway, the commercial corridor, which had Goldblatt’s, Sears, Lytton’s, H. Gordon & Sons, Radigan Bros. Furniture, the Palace Theatre. West of Broadway was for white steelyard managers, who lived on streets named for U.S. Presidents, arranged in the order of their Inauguration, Washington to Taft. East of Broadway, the streets were named for states. West-side houses were roomy and lovely, and made of brick. Immigrants and Black workers, most of them migrants from the Deep South, were pushed into overcrowded neighborhoods with houses made of tarpaper and wood.

Steelworkers worked all the time. Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about it in 1915, called “The Mayor of Gary”: “I asked the mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week. / And the mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in the United States.” Sandburg’s steelworkers had shoulder muscles “hard as pig iron” and wore leather shoes “pitted with little holes from running molten steel.” When steelworkers went on strike in 1919, U.S. Steel put the strike down, backed by federal troops. The company eventually shifted to an eight-hour workday; some steelworkers had lived in Gary for more than a decade without getting a glimpse of Lake Michigan.

Gary became the second-largest city in Indiana, behind Indianapolis, the capital. By 1960, more than a hundred and seventy-eight thousand people lived there, and about thirty thousand people worked at Gary Works. U.S. Steel was the city’s largest employer, landowner, and taxpayer. There was no secondary industry; when demand for steel dropped, Gary went into a decline. Many of the Black residents were mired in conditions that people “wouldn’t allow dogs to live in,” a young lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P., Richard Gordon Hatcher, later said.

In 1967, Hatcher was elected mayor of Gary. He was sworn in on the same day as Carl B. Stokes, in Cleveland—they were the first Black mayors of American cities with a population of a hundred thousand or more—and his goals reflected those of the national civil-rights movement. Hatcher wanted Black citizens to start getting the good houses, the bank loans, the well-paid management positions; he wanted U.S. Steel to curb its poisons and to earn its keep in taxes. He declared “corporate capital” an impediment to Black actualization. Gary often found itself on the adverse end of legislation and policy. Indiana’s first interstate highway, which opened in the early fifties, bypassed downtown Gary, and although the state had a buffer-zone law to prevent new towns from setting up near major cities, lawmakers allowed Merrillville to incorporate next door, in 1971. Merrillville got the hotels, the restaurants, the car dealerships—the growth. Increasingly, white people, who could better afford to move, bailed on Gary.

In 1972, Gary hosted the National Black Political Convention. More than eight thousand people showed up, including Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Bennie Thompson and Maxine Waters, who were later elected to Congress. Chicago’s WGN-TV called the gathering the temporary “hub of the Black universe.” Gary hemorrhaged even more white people after that. Between 1960 and 1990, the city lost about sixty thousand residents.

The steel industry, meanwhile, was suffering periods of severe contraction amid automation and foreign competition. Tens of thousands of steelworkers in and around Gary were laid off, and high unemployment led to crime. As police officers retired, the city could not afford to replace them, emboldening drug dealers and gangs. The city got a nickname, Scary Gary. “We just didn’t see anything to do but move out,” a former resident said in a 1997 documentary, “The Magic City of Steel.” Unemployed or underemployed residents lost their homes when they could no longer afford the mortgages and the taxes. Properties deteriorated. Broadway boarded up. The plummeting property values bled Gary of tax revenue for roads, schools, street lights, firefighters, garbage pickup.

By the time Melton was born, in 1981, Gary’s population had long since swung from mostly white to mostly Black. His mother worked at American National Can, making the silver tabs on soft drinks. (A part-time job at her factory—sleeving tabs, pushing skids—convinced Melton that manual labor was not for him.) The family lived on the west side of Broadway, near City Methodist Church, a Gothic limestone masterpiece whose sanctuary seated a thousand people. Melton had only ever known the church as abandoned, Broadway as a husk. One recent day in the Mayor’s office, Harris, the redevelopment director, showed him a Facebook video of the 1939 Gary Christmas parade. Spectators, all white, stood six deep on Broadway. Downtown had what Melton called “hustle and bustle.” He said, “It’s like a whole ’nother city. It’s like a fairy tale.”

Ruin, Gary style, means doors and windows gone. Roofs gone. Trees in bedrooms and parlors. Dead ivy, heavy graffiti. Plywood, if it lasts. An eyesore near City Hall dropped bricks so often that the city had to cordon off the street. Plug Gary into Google Maps and up pops an image of a dilapidated house. When Melton took office, in December, 2023, four in ten buildings in town were falling apart; roughly seven thousand were vacant. The previous mayor had used campaign funds to buy a house and would soon plead guilty to federal wire fraud. Gary had not had a full-time city engineer in fifteen years, but Melton hired one, which is how he came to know how many hundreds of utility lights were out, and that most of the roads needed paving, and which stop signs had lost their reflectivity. (Driving around town, I saw intersections that had both a dead, dangling traffic light and a stop sign—the fix for the broken light.) Gary has five E.P.A. Superfund sites; since cleanup began, in 1998, eight hundred thousand cubic yards of tainted sediment have been removed from the Grand Calumet River, which passes through the steelyard. Melton had assumed stewardship of a place that has been called “the Pompeii of the Midwest” and “the most miserable city in America.” Fewer than sixty-eight thousand people lived there—a third of them below the national poverty line—and Melton was trying to hang on to every last one. “We cannot lose any more people,” he told me.

Gary did feel pretty bleak when I was there in December and January. No hustle or bustle. I saw a boy on a four-wheeler making snow doughnuts in a yard and a man nearly get hit by a car on his way into a package store. Downtown, I met a guy named Cisco Diaz, who was delivering homemade tamales on his birthday. “I’m the tamale man out of Chicago,” he told me. “I make mine from scratch.” He sells three to a ziplock—cheese, bean, spicy chicken. Gary is both a stop on Diaz’s route and his home. He told me that he moved there from Cook County, Illinois, because “taxes.” Illinois has one of the highest property-tax rates in the country, and residents of Chicago, thirty miles up the lakeshore, pay a sales tax of more than ten per cent. Diaz lives in Miller Beach, Gary’s best-kept secret: an upscale neighborhood on the South Shore Line, a commuter rail system that connects Chicago to South Bend, home to Notre Dame. Miller Beach is next door to Indiana Dunes National Park; it’s got a beach and a charming commercial district (Miller Pizza Co., Tiny’s Coffee Bar). The nicest homes there sell for more than a million dollars. Gary needs more Diazes, but it needs them downtown, where there are so many hundreds of abandoned homes and vacant lots that, when the city recently mapped them in red, it looked like a bloodbath.

Two days before Christmas, City Hall was clearing out for the holiday. A brightly decorated tree lit the marble landing between floors. Three newly sworn-in firefighters and nine police officers were celebrating with their families and colleagues at a reception. Markael Watkins, a longtime steelworker who also serves as a senior aide to Melton, was collecting helmets for his annual bicycle drive. In the garage, sacks of donated onions and potatoes awaited distribution. Melton, Harris, and I jumped into the back of the Mayor’s black S.U.V. At the wheel was Calvin Bankhead, a retired firefighter and former steelworker in his seventies who had on a gray suit, a burgundy argyle sweater-vest, and a tie. We drove over to Horace Mann High School, Melton’s alma mater, now a gargantuan wreck popular with urban explorers. “It’s been closed for, what, about twenty years?” Melton asked Harris. Melton said that his administration had just ordered the owner, the Gary Housing Authority, to fortify the building against trespassers: content creators are constantly traipsing through, to shoot what the Mayor calls “ruin porn.”

Owners of derelict properties across town were similarly on notice. In one of the oldest neighborhoods, dozens of abandoned structures had just been razed. The Emerson School—the model school from the 1913 promotional video—closed seventeen years ago and has been repeatedly set on fire. When we rode by, Bankhead, who spent more than four decades at the Gary Fire Department, gazed up at the edifice and said, “I think it’s shot.”

We went down some of the President streets. Melton pointed out a house with Georgian columns and said, “I used to think that was the White House.” Of a redbrick cottage that had a storybook aspect, he said, “That was a beautiful home right there, too. Still is.” This was his old neighborhood. He and his mother and siblings lived there with an aunt, at her place, after his parents split up, and then in a two-story house with ochre siding, several blocks away. That house looked good—inhabited. The aunt’s house sat charred and collapsing. Melton said that his aunt got sick, moved to a nursing home, and died before she could make arrangements, and that squatters likely started the fire. “That’s what happens in Gary,” he added.

Online, I found a listing for the aunt’s house: nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars. In the same neighborhood, a five-bedroom, four-bath brick house, built in 1928, was selling for just under two hundred and seventy thousand. The house had recently been renovated, top to bottom, and looked beautiful, with arched doors and glossy hardwoods. A great many of the city’s historic homes are intact. (“Gary’s got some of the best housing stock in the country,” Bankhead said.) Whoever purchased the remodelled house would owe less than a thousand dollars a year in property taxes.

Melton had a meeting, so we headed back to City Hall. Bankhead pulled into the garage and let him out near the potatoes and onions.

The big news in Gary was that U.S. Steel was for sale. This had been the case since the summer of 2023, when Cleveland-Cliffs, a steelmaker in Ohio, aware of a downturn in the company’s profits, tried to buy it and was rebuffed. There was a new offer, from Nippon Steel Corporation, the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker, based in Tokyo. Nippon proposed paying $14.9 billion, nearly a billion of which would go to Gary Works, and included a five-thousand-dollar bonus for every employee of U.S. Steel.

U.S. Steel wanted the deal. Killeen, Gary Works’ vice-president, told me that during a recent trip to Japan he had learned about Nippon’s plans to use hydrogen instead of coke to fuel blast furnaces—the kind of green steel technology that has been slow to take hold in the U.S. “A lot of the technical stuff that they’re going to advise us on is gonna be valuable,” he told me. Nippon planned to revamp blast furnace No. 14 instead of doing an elaborate green makeover, but it impressed Killeen that the company spent five hundred million dollars a year on research: “All the domestic companies in the United States do not invest five hundred million dollars on research combined. Americans are short-term thinkers. Why invest in a project that might pay off in fifteen years? It’s not our style. We want it now.”

The outgoing President, Joe Biden, was insisting that U.S. Steel—an “iconic American” company—remain in domestic hands. His successor, Donald Trump, opposed the Nippon takeover, too. They and others cited national-security concerns without explaining what that meant. Melton did not see Japanese ownership as a problem; Japan was already the U.S.’s largest foreign investor and one of its strongest allies. The two countries were competing with China, which dominates the world’s steelmaking. Killeen pointed out that Gary Works has no defense contracts: the factory no longer makes munitions and battleship parts, as it did during the Second World War. “To think that we’d need any of these facilities like we did to build the arsenal of democracy is pretty foolish.”

Gary Works now employs about forty-three hundred people; Killeen estimated that only ten to fifteen per cent of them live in town. The top leaders of their union, United Steelworkers, had been working against Nippon, saying that the company would close plants and impose layoffs, but Melton was hearing that rank-and-file steelworkers tended to support the sale. He got a lot of his information through Watkins, the senior aide, who has worked for U.S. Steel as a heavy-equipment operator and truck driver since 1996.

Before U.S. Steel, Watkins worked for the city of Gary. He had tried to get a job at the steelyard but had no luck until a U.S. Steel foreman happened to see him flawlessly put a semi into an impossible parking space. (“I backed up perfect. I couldn’t do it again if you asked me to.”) The foreman asked for a résumé on the spot. Watkins went straight home and got one. “Opportunities don’t go away,” he told me. “They just go to somebody else.” He felt that way about the Nippon deal; union skepticism notwithstanding, the company was promising to protect jobs and pensions. “You have to respect those steelworkers that came before us,” he said. “A lot of them didn’t have none of the safety stuff. They was out there working in regular clothes, stuff falling on their feet, their feet getting broke.” Melton had participated in some of the negotiations. On December 12th, at a press conference at Gary City Hall, he stood next to a Nippon executive and called the sale “the right thing” for the citizens of Gary, the economy, and the United States.

Biden blocked the deal before leaving office, in January. Cleveland-Cliffs, the original suitor, partnered with Nucor, a big steelmaker in Charlotte, and got back in the running. U.S. Steel and Nippon filed lawsuits alleging that they were unfairly undermined—by the government, by the union, by Cleveland-Cliffs. When I asked Melton whether Gary had been invited to join the legal action, he told me, “That’s not our fight.” He was paying close attention to the developments, though. Before the prospect of new ownership arose, he said that he had never received even a call from the C.E.O. of U.S. Steel, much less a “Merry Christmas” text. The possible sale “opened the door for conversation, to say, ‘Listen, you know our current condition. Let’s reëstablish this partnership with the city of Gary and U.S. Steel regardless of what happens.’ ”

Gary Works had several unused parcels of land that the Mayor had been eying as part of a plan to transform Gary into a logistics and transportation hub. (The city has three major railroads, four interstate highways, a deepwater port, and an airport.) Pollution would never cease to be a concern, especially given that Melton intended to rebuild downtown, which is within walking distance of the steelyard. Last spring, when he issued an executive order creating the Greater Gary Environment and Sustainability Advisory Council, Dorreen Carey, the president of an environmental organization called Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, pointed out, “If we are going to revitalize Gary, issues of sustainability and pollution control really have to be taken into account up front.”

Killeen had called Nippon “the leader in decarbonization, from a blast-furnace perspective”; the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, meanwhile, were praising Cleveland-Cliffs for “planning noteworthy clean investments across multiple facilities.” Still, there were no guarantees of how much green steel tech Gary would get; a company town inevitably depends on the whims and fortunes of its company. In the sixties and seventies, U.S. Steel had been known to actively oppose community upgrades, for fear of improvements leading to higher property taxes. In the 1997 documentary, Tom Ferrall, U.S. Steel’s director of public affairs at the time, admitted, “A steel plant or any business that is having trouble turning black numbers at its bottom line is not going to be very generally disposed toward investing a lot of big money to deal with civic problems.” In early January, Melton told me that all the uncertainty surrounding U.S. Steel made him “want to work even harder, to build new relationships.”

On Friday, Trump, hosting the Prime Minister of Japan at the White House, announced that a deal with Nippon, which he called “Nissan,” was back on: Nippon would “invest heavily” in U.S. Steel rather than buy it. The details would be forthcoming. Melton was caught off guard; he sounded energized that evening when I called him. “I’m pleased that the deal is alive,” he said, adding, “I’m reserving my excitement until it’s been inked.”

From 2016 to 2023, Melton, a Democrat, served in the state Senate. He, like nearly eighty per cent of Gary’s population, is Black; the state legislature is overwhelmingly white and Republican. The people of Gary have often felt underrepresented “downstate,” Northwest Indiana’s term for Indianapolis and the legislature. (Before running for office, Melton oversaw the community-relations department at NIPSCO, northern Indiana’s public-utilities company, and served on the state board of education, as an appointee of Mike Pence.)

During Melton’s first term in the Senate, he courted bipartisan support for legislation that allowed Indiana’s casinos, which had mostly been restricted to water locations, to move inland. (One of the first casino boats in Gary belonged to Trump, who promised to build a luxury hotel there but soon abandoned that plan and sold the casino.) Melton invited several influential colleagues, all Republicans, to Gary. Standing on the roof of a parking garage overlooking Buffington Harbor, where casino boats had been docked since the early nineties, he asked them, “Do you think that’s the highest and best use of this land?” The law passed. In 2021, Hard Rock International opened a three-hundred-million-dollar casino just off one of Gary’s interstates, and later donated three million dollars to the city’s effort to eradicate blight.

The casino law cleared the way for other uses of Buffington Harbor, which is just northwest of the steelyard and Gary/Chicago International Airport—largely a cargo facility. Indiana Sugars, a family-owned company that’s been in Gary since 1923, had been thinking of leaving town. Instead, Sugars bought more than seventy acres at Buffington, where it’s planning to build a new headquarters and manufacturing center. “There’s no reason why Amazon, FedEx, UPS wouldn’t want to be there,” Melton told an audience at a town hall on October 30th, in an auditorium at Indiana University Northwest, which people forget is in Gary. The Chicago Tribune called the Indiana Sugars deal the Mayor’s “first big economic win.”

At the town hall, Melton, working the stage in a polo, jeans, and sneakers, ran through more of his plans. During his time in the Senate, he got state lawmakers to allocate six million dollars to help Gary with blight. The city had thirty-two million dollars in E.P.A. funding to equip low-income housing with solar panels, whose output can be sold back to the grid. Another ninety million dollars—more Melton legislation—was earmarked for a new train station. (In January, Trump froze federal grants and other funding, jeopardizing a wide array of crucial endeavors.) In a project with potentially sweeping impact, the city was giving away downtown lots to residents who agreed to rebuild or rehab. Detroit did something similar a decade ago, attracting a flood of investment. The median home value doubled.

Last summer, Gary partnered with the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative, which was founded in 2021 to help beleaguered Rust Belt communities recover from decades of disinvestment. Marianne Cusato, the director, described it to me as a “think-and-do tank.” She and her colleagues have proposed redesigns for seven communities within a hundred-mile radius of Notre Dame. Their plan for downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan—mixed-use redevelopment, walkable streets—has attracted ninety-eight million dollars in funding. The blueprint for Elkhart, Indiana, included remaking a neighborhood where low-income residents had been displaced by a highway, and turning one of the Rust Belt’s many brownfields—former industrial locations—into a park. The architects pay special attention to human-migration patterns and freshwater locations. “What happens when California and Florida insurance companies say, ‘We can’t afford this anymore—we’re out’? Where are those people going to go?” Cusato asked. Gary made a case for itself, she said, by having both significant infrastructure and proximity to the lake. “We can’t just walk away from that,” she told me, declaring, “The future is the Midwest.”

On a dreary Friday in January, in a conference room at City Hall, Cusato and Harris, the redevelopment director, showed me a draft of the proposal for Gary. Stefanos Polyzoides, Cusato’s dean, dialled in from Pasadena, where he owns a home. Los Angeles was burning; Polyzoides was already making inquiries about what could be done for wildfire victims. Cusato, who specializes in disaster housing, created what is now known as the Katrina Cottage, a sturdier, far prettier alternative to the dreaded FEMA trailer. (“A lot more character and a lot more soul,” a Mississippi Gulf Coast mayor told the press when she saw a prototype, after Hurricane Katrina.)

Cusato and her team had designed an enhanced (and permanent) version for Gary. The abundance of vacant lots in the city offered “an uncommonly blank slate to work with,” reads the draft proposal, a hundred-and-fifty-seven pages of renderings printed on gigantic paper. The Gary at the tip of the architects’ colored pencils has a transformed Broadway—hustle and bustle—and downtown neighborhoods filled with cottages, two-story duplexes, and multifamily homes. Residents who agreed to repopulate the core would be able to choose from a variety of housing templates. Rezoning is already under way. When I asked why anything should be rebuilt in a place that still sits in the shadow of heavy polluters, Cusato said, “You have to move forward despite them. And, like most things, there’s a certain point at which success breeds success. U.S. Steel’s gonna be saying, ‘Look what we did in Gary, Indiana!’ You just have to muddle through the first bit.”

The other day, the Mayor had a browser tab open on Don Peebles, among the richest Black real-estate developers in America. Melton cued up a video on a flat-screen TV in his office; the narrator sounded like the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” guy: “He is now wealthier than both Barack Obama and Will Smith!” Peebles told the camera, “I grew up during a time of transition in America, during the civil-rights movement in the United States, and so I got a very good sense that anything was possible.” A philosophy of Melton’s is to never “ask for anything”; he would rather create the conditions that inspire people to come to you. He told me, “Everybody’s waiting on who’s gonna be the first one to jump in.”

In Joe Biden’s last month in office, he blocked a bid by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, to buy U.S. Steel, insisting that it remain in domestic hands.

During the Gary Works tour, Melton asked Killeen, the vice-president, “How many acres do you have here?” About four thousand, Killeen told him. This equalled roughly twelve per cent of Gary’s landmass, which is slightly larger in square mileage than San Francisco’s. Not many mayors have what Killeen called a “nine-billion-dollar entity” “parked” in their city.

Gary has been trying to get more support from U.S. Steel since at least the fifties. The company always had what one academic paper described, in 1960, as “an expensive battery of attorneys” and the propensity to donate to Republicans, who have long dominated the legislature. Hatcher, the first Black mayor, who stayed in office for twenty years and has often been blamed for Gary’s decline, argued that the U.S. Steel property was “grossly underassessed,” as Andrew Hurley, a historian at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, writes in “Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980.” At one point, Hatcher demanded to inspect the steelmaker’s books, “a move designed to prod the company into negotiations.” U.S. Steel got a restraining order.

Hatcher later “confessed a naïveté in dealing with U.S. Steel,” Hurley writes. “From the start, he had understood that the company represented an obstacle to social progress due to its discriminatory hiring policies and its disregard for community welfare. He sincerely believed, however, that by raising these issues publicly and negotiating with steel management he could swing the company around.”

U.S. Steel did stop requiring its hires to have a high-school diploma, per Hatcher’s request. Hurley notes that the company promised to spend ten million dollars on a low-income housing project in Gary, but that it would often lobby “behind the scenes” against the city’s various revitalization efforts in the state legislature. Then, in 1999, the state of Indiana allowed U.S. Steel to start assessing its own property value; the company’s tax burden in Gary dropped by more than fifty per cent and has hardly budged since. (U.S. Steel said that it has “fully cooperated” with the state in valuing Gary Works and that it has “donated over $1.3 million to community organizations and efforts.”) After allowing the self-assessment, lawmakers capped residential property taxes and raised the sales tax. Gary and other cities across Indiana collectively lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Melton had hoped that the Nippon takeover would put a high, concrete valuation on Gary Works and give the city leverage to argue for a higher levy. “I don’t want to make it seem like they’re not doing anything,” he told me. “They made a sizable contribution to our hospital about two years ago, and they may sponsor events here and there.” At the steelyard, our tour van passed high berms that blocked all sight of Lake Michigan. “Sometimes the lake tries to swallow us,” Killeen explained. The view in the other direction was almost as blank. From Gary you can see U.S. Steel, but from U.S. Steel you can’t really see Gary.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/17/gary-indiana-and-the-long-shadow-of-us-steel