The mayor and a dozen or so other city officials were gathered in a conference room to hear ideas about reviving retail business in Gary. “This is a big deal,” said Richard Leverett, JD’10, the mayor’s interim chief of staff. The agreement included a pledge not just to bring business to the airport but to train and hire Gary residents. In 2013 the airport lost its only airline-the sixth to have come and gone since 1999-and was hardly used. Karen Freeman-Wilson, Gary’s mayor since 2012, had brought good news: that morning, officials of the Gary airport had approved a deal with a private company to spend $100 million over 40 years to develop the airport and the surrounding area, which for decades had failed to deliver the economic boost that had been hoped for. Still, the mood in city hall was buoyant that January afternoon. When nearly 20 inches of snow fell, overwelming Gary’s crews, the mayor of nearby Portage, Indiana, sent four more plows-and caught grief for showing neighborliness toward Gary. “We have more workers than snowplows,” said Cloteal LaBroi, the city’s public works director.
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To clear its 434 miles of streets, Gary deployed a fleet of just four snowplows plus an assortment of pickup trucks fitted with blades. Covering 50 square miles, the city is too big for its residents and for efficient snow removal. Jobs have disappeared, more than a third of residents live in poverty, and the population has dwindled to less than half its former size.
The thriving steel town that once proclaimed itself “City of the Century” has become one of the most impoverished and economically depressed cities in the country. To a city as economically battered as Gary, the harsh winter of 2014 was a special affront. To the north, on the other side of Interstate 90, gigantic clouds of smoke and steam billowed from US Steel’s sprawling Gary Works, which hummed along despite the cold.
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Most of the sidewalks were full of snow, so pedestrians walked in the street, including a blind woman in a fur coat who found her way by tapping her cane against the windrow of snow. It drove wisps of snow past boarded-up shops and tugged at the plastic that hung over the empty floors of an abandoned Sheraton Hotel. An icy wind blew down Broadway, the main street in Gary, Indiana.
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