Outside small-town America, the arrival of a fast-food franchise would merit scant attention. Politicians and businessmen would not attend the grand opening, and it would not be written about in the local newspaper. The mayor would not speak.
Gary is different. With one-fifth of its work force unemployed, 1 in every 10 of its homes vacant, its murder rate the worst in the nation, its downtown virtually abandoned and its population shrinking, this hardscrabble steel town of 147,532 welcomes any new business.
On April 16 the first Wendy`s Old Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant opened in Gary. ”Everyone,” restaurant manager Silas Wilkerson said, ”was there.” Mayor Richard Hatcher addressed the crowd of dignitaries, and the next day the Gary Post-Tribune carried a short story on the opening.
Three months later, the coming of Wendy`s is still being talked about.
”Larger cities, like Chicago, would look down their noses at fast-food franchises, but Wendy`s represents 80 jobs,” Hatcher said, explaining why so much attention has been paid to the opening of a restaurant in a city where steel mills once employed tens of thousands.
The franchise symbolizes more than jobs, however. The city`s leadership points to Wendy`s as a sign that Gary has ended a 20-year tumble and is on the economic rebound again.
”I absolutely believe that Gary has reached bottom and is on the way back up,” said Bill Joiner, a vice president of Gainer Bank, the largest chartered bank in Gary, and president of the board that oversees the municipal convention center.
Hatcher agreed: ”There really is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Gary is in its current condition despite more than $1.62 billion that congressional sources say Gary has received over Hatcher`s 18 years in office. City officials cannot detail where the federal money was spent and Hatcher concedes that there is not a lot to show for much of it. ”We don`t have a building you can point to,” he said. ”But a lot of people were working, people who otherwise would not have had a job.”
Since President Reagan was elected, however, the federal tap has been all but turned off, prompting even the most optimistic to temper their outlook.
They also acknowledge that Gary`s decline has been so precipitous and its handicaps have become so debilitating that it would take years, even in the best of times, for the city to regain its vitality.
What has happened over the last decade at the United States Steel Corp., the largest employer in Gary, is illustrative. Ten years ago the 3,587-acre Gary works had more than 30,000 employees. It now has 8,000. And Thomas Ferrall, U.S. Steel`s public affairs manager, said, ”I wouldn`t want to suggest any hope for increased employment at this plant.”
Edwin Marshall, who recently moved from Gary to Michigan City, Ind., was laid off as an apprentice millwright at U.S. Steel. He now is a guard at the Westville Correctional Center and earns half of what he did in the mill.
”This city (Gary) looks like it`s going completely downhill,” he said.
”I don`t see any future.”
Gary, the third largest city in Indiana and the 110th largest in the nation, was founded in 1906 as the massive U.S. Steel plant was rising from the sand dunes and scrub oaks along the northwest Indiana shoreline of Lake Michigan.
It was, in many ways, a company town. The city was laid out by U.S. Steel engineers, and its first housing subdivision was built by a U.S. Steel subsidiary on U.S. Steel land. The city is even named for a U.S. Steel figure: Elbert H. Gary, a Wheaton, Ill., native who was then the firm`s chairman.
Since reaching a peak of 182,000 people in 1968, the city`s population has shrunk by almost 20 percent, and state labor statisticians foresee a continued migration. All across the country, cities have lost population to suburbs. Gary, though often characterized as a suburb itself, is no exception. In Gary`s case, however, there was an additional factor spurring the exodus: race. From 1950 to 1980, Gary`s black population went from a little more than one-quarter of the total population to almost three-quarters. Today, the city is estimated to be 80 percent black.
Merrillville was the biggest beneficiary of Gary`s racial change. A town of 27,000 immediately to the south of Gary, Merrillville is almost exclusively white–the 1980 census found only 36 blacks–and its 1981 per capita income was $10,641 compared with Gary`s $7,203. Most of its residents at one time lived in Gary.
Gary lost more than people, however. Businesses pulled out too. The effects are shown downtown.
The city`s central shopping strip was Broadway between 5th and 10th Avenues. Through the early 1960s it boasted five department stores and was the retail hub of northwest Indiana.
Today, all five stores are boarded up except for a corner of the old Sears, Roebuck & Co. store. That houses an office of the Lake County Department of Public Welfare.
The flight of the city`s merchants is not unique to Gary, of course.
”But in Gary,” noted Robert Catlin, chairman of the department of minority studies at the Indiana University Northwest campus in Gary, ”not only did retail trade leave and leave suddenly, but the major financial institutions, the real estate, insurance and related functions, left as well.”
An often cited example is the Gary National Bank, which for decades stood at the corner of Broadway and 5th Avenue, a 10-story monument to the city`s financial stature.
Five years ago the bank, while retaining its charter in Gary, moved its administrative and executive offices to a new, white, eight-story building with landscaped grounds and a fountain in Merrillville. The bank further distanced itself from Gary by later changing its name to Gainer Bank.
Despite mounting evidence that Gary was faltering, however, the shop closings and ”white flight” were often obscured by the still-robust steel industry and the abundance of federal grants.
Then, in 1980, the steel industry caved in. According to the state, employment reached its zenith in Lake County in 1979 at 231,600. Since then, the number of jobs has declined to 185,100, which means that 1 in every 5 jobs that existed six years ago has disappeared.
Gary, not surprisingly, is still reeling. So is the housing market.
In Aetna, a working-class neighborhood on Gary`s east side, three-bedroom homes built in the 1950s are selling for $15,000 to $35,000, said Gene Ayers, owner of Ayers Realtors Inc. Nearby, in the Miller section, Gary`s most exclusive neighborhood, newer lakefront homes are selling for $125,000, he said.
As the recession hit, Gary was also walloped by federal cutbacks.
In 1980, said City Controller Charles Ruckman, the city received $44.7 million from the federal government, or 52 percent of its $86.4 million budget. Three years later, Gary received $19.3 million in federal money, or 29 percent of its $66 million budget.
Of those projects funded by the federal government, the Genesis Convention Center is Gary`s showpiece. Along with a municipal athletic facility and transportation center, both nearly completed, and a highway interchange that will, for the first time, link the Indiana Toll Road with downtown Gary, it is also the city`s future.
Built at a cost of $13 million and opened on Jan. 1, 1983, the convention center downtown contains an 8,000-seat arena and more than 68,000 square feet of exhibition space, making it the largest indoor facility in the area.
Last year the facility hosted its first major convention, a national gathering of Baptists. Some 34,000 people attended the weeklong event. A three-day rodeo was held last May, and a pro basketball game is scheduled for October.
Still, Wilma Washington, the center`s executive manager, is disappointed. The arena has been used only two times a month this year, and the center`s $1 million budget is falling about $100,000 short because of overly optimistic projections.
Washington blames the facility`s poor record in part on the fact that Gary does not have a hotel. The 13-story hotel across the street from the Genesis Center has gone out of business under two owners since it opened in 1969.
Washington says she must also fight to overcome the city`s image, which is one of unsafe streets.
Crime has been decreasing annually since 1979, yet it remains high. According to the FBI`s Uniform Crime Reports, issued last week, Gary last year had the most murders per capita of any large city in the country. Gary`s rate of 54.8 murders per 100,000 residents was almost seven times the nationwide rate of 7.9 murders per 100,000.
In 1984 Gary had 82 murders. Rockford and Ft. Wayne, two blue-collar cities of comparable size, had 10 and 3 respectively.
As for a comeback, predicted from time to time, boosters now note that City Venture Corp., a subsidiary of Minneapolis-based Control Data Corp., announced Friday that it will establish an ”incubator” for new businesses in the city`s enterprise zone near downtown.
Goldblatt Brothers Inc., which closed the last remaining downtown department store in 1981, has also announced plans to open a new store in a shopping mall on the outskirts of town this summer.
Gary Municipal Airport is undergoing a $31 million federally funded improvement program and since April has had a scheduled airline, Britt Airways Inc.
Also, U.S. Steel, which accounts for half the city`s property tax revenue, has pledged to stay in Gary. Ferrall says the plant is now the Pittsburgh company`s flagship and has some of the most modern equipment in the world. The region, meanwhile, has become the nation`s leading steelmaker.
Furthermore, Hatcher said, ”over the last year, 30 new companies and businesses moved into the city of Gary. These are not tremendous manufacturing centers. But they will bring 60 jobs, 100 jobs, 200 jobs. And that starts adding up.”
Wendy`s was brought to Gary by Charles Finley Jr., son of the former owner of the Oakland A`s baseball team. Several former steelworkers are among its employees. For the most part, Finley says, they are paid the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour.
That troubles many, among them the mayor. ”Sure we would rather have the $15- to $20-an-hour jobs that the steel mills used to provide,” Hatcher said, ”but that is not reality. From our point of view, we have to get jobs first. Then, later on, we can be selective.”
