One For The Road: The Invention Of Gary, Ind.
By Samantha Abernethy in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 17, 2012 10:40PM
On this date in 1906, the city of Gary, Ind., was created by the U.S. Steel Corporation. They found this "wasteland" of sand dunes perfectly situated amongst the necessary natural resources. It took merely months for U.S. Steel to turn the dunes into a city.
The company had planned everything, from the lakefront harbor to the plat for a government center to a street grid south of the new steel mill. "Sloughs were filled," the Tribune reported later, "towering 60-foot sand dunes leveled, two miles of the Grand Calumet river bed was shifted. Millions of dollars worth of black loam was imported from Illinois to cover the sands of ages. "Boomtown" is not an explosive enough term to describe Gary during its early years. By the end of 1906, 10,000 people resided in the nation's first "instant city." The following February, steel flowed as liquid fire from the new blast furnaces. In the dense industrial region that developed from Lake Calumet in Chicago through northwestern Indiana, Gary Works soon held pride of place. Even in the mid-1990s, it was the largest steel mill in the U.S.
Gary was named after board chairman Elbert Gary, and it was quickly nicknamed the Steel City.* Gary was planned for 200,000 citizens, but it peaked at 178,000 in 1960.
(Editor's Note: That nickname more accurately belongs to Pittsburgh. Just sayin'.)