Gary partners with Notre Dame for 10-year downtown master plan

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The city of Gary is partnering with faculty at the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture to reimagine and revitalize its downtown Broadway corridor over the next 10 years, city officials announced Tuesday.

While still serving as state senator, Gary’s current Mayor, Eddie Melton, authored SB 434, which provides matching funds to cities for the destruction of blighted properties within the transit development district. The city received $6 million from the state, $3 million from Hard Rock Casino of Northern Indiana and will put up the remaining $3 million.

Apart from the downtown plan, the city is working on commissioning a new Adam Benjamin Metro Station in the next few years, Melton said.

“We’re not going to do this in a vacuum. We’re not going to develop without engaging the public in this process to make sure you are aware of what’s getting torn down, the environmental impacts, how we are going to design,” Melton said.

The partnership with Notre Dame’s School of Architecture was largely orchestrated by the city’s Corporation Counsel and Notre Dame alum, Carla Morgan.

“They’re going to help us create an attractive, walkable city, which will reinforce our sense of community and vastly improve the quality of life for our residents,” Morgan said. “I’m proud to have graduated from a university that not only instills character in its students, but exhibits it by doing these kinds of projects in Indiana and Southern Michigan.”

Once a thriving steel town, Gary is littered with several empty storefronts and graffiti. The city’s population has more than halved since the 1960s. In its glory days, the city was one of the first to integrate its public school system, elect a Black mayor and host the largest National Black Political Convention. The northwestern city is also popular for being the birthplace of pop icon, Michael Jackson.

“Today, Gary is infamous for loss and disinvestment, but the story of Gary is not finished,” Notre Dame School of Architecture’s Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative Director Marianne Cusato said. “Together, we will create a vision and an action plan for the future to provide opportunity, hope and pride of place. The issues you face in Gary are serious, but they’re not unsurmountable.”

The Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative is a think-and-do tank, working primarily with municipalities and not-for-profits throughout the Midwest to reverse the impact of decades of unjust infrastructure and housing policy, leaving downtowns throughout the region in a state of disrepair. 

“You have incredible vision keepers at each level of government. This team has the insights, the instincts and the expertise to deliver. You have members of your community who remember Gary from before the losses and have fought to preserve the historic structures and that memory,” Cusato said. “But you have another incredible group of visionaries, many of whom are here today, who I’ve met over the course of the last few weeks, who are in college and in high school. They’re the legacy keepers of your future.”

The partnership will kick off with two listening sessions on Aug. 5 and 9, where community members and stakeholders will tell the Notre Dame team all the things that make Gary special, areas for improvement, non-negotiables and air concerns.

Following the listening sessions, Cusato’s team will hold a charrette to lay out a synthesized compilation of input from residents and stakeholders to make room for amendments and clarifications. The team will then begin the planning process and expects to come up with a recommendation within a couple of months.

The Regeneration Initiative has worked with several cities within a 100-mile radius of Notre Dame’s campus including La Porte, Elkhart, and Kalamazoo, Michigan. In Elkhart, they proposed the restoration of two way streets in the city’s Benham Neighborhood, as a harbinger for greater economic activity.

Adding that the location for the announcement was intentional, Melton commented on the utility of the Genesis Tower, once a busy hotel and now serving as housing for some of Gary’s senior citizens.

“These individuals also live in the shadows of one of the most decrepit buildings in the city of Gary as well as a dangerous structure,” he said. “It still has a beauty to it even with its own mystique that we see right now, with the roof caving in and this Gothic structure in the Old City Methodist building.”

With a school now located opposite the now-closed City Methodist Church, Melton added that while the charrette process will investigate the benefit and cost of saving the building, he prioritizes the safety of the school children.

“If you look at that structure that gives you some context on how beautiful Gary still is, but how beautiful it once was,” Melton said. “I believe our friends today will help us strike that right balance as we look to redevelop the city of Gary.”

About a year ago, Gary’s director of redevelopment, Chris Harris, found a 1959 report that the Gary Chamber of Commerce had procured from Cornell University’s City and Regional Planning Department. The report had recommended that the city increase downtown parking as well as make the city more accessible to automobiles or risk seeing nearby cities and towns get all the traffic.

“Unfortunately, the latter is what happened for decades, our downtown has fallen into a steep economic slumber. After years of divestment and isolation, we’ve lost historic structures that represented our city’s history and culture,” Harris said. “But we knew that the Notre Dame School of Architecture and their 100-mile housing program could develop and chart a new path for our city and our downtown’s core moving forward at this critical moment in time.”

With this partnership, Harris hopes to see a mix of single family homes, workforce housing and commercial buildings that respect the city’s identity and fit within originally planned lots come into the transit development district between 4th and 19th Avenue. 

“Downtown Gary is critical to our redevelopment plan strengthening our city’s tax base. Financially, they are the most productive locations and neighborhoods of a city and are generally responsible for financing a lion’s share of basic services that are enjoyed by residents of all neighborhoods,” Harris said. “This collaboration with the Notre Dame School of Architecture provides us the opportunity to intentionally plan a broader walkable, mixed use downtown, creating a more robust environment than a traditional corridor development that existed here in downtown Gary along Broadway Avenue.”

With the city’s proximity to Chicago, its location on the South Shore Line route and being the western gateway to the Indiana Dunes National Park, Harris is confident that Gary will once again be remembered for good.