2016 SHOULD BE ABOUT CITIES LIKE THIS ONE
This broken American city, one of so much past glory and even greater heartache, is what the 2016 election should be about. If you’re running for president, you should be talking and thinking hard about the nation’s biggest challenges, and this city represents so many of them. From devastating levels of crime and educational failure to an economic collapse that is almost absolute, Gary is nothing short of an American tragedy.
“It’s almost like they’ve all forgotten about it,” Dottie Taylor told me last month as she sat in the Gary transit center, waiting to catch a train to nearby Chicago. “Gary has gone down a lot and it’s almost like nobody cares.”
Drive around this once bustling city, which used to claim nearly 180,000 residents but now doesn’t have even half that many, and it can seem nobody cares. That is, until you talk to the people who live here. ‘WHAT’S BEING DONE?’ People like Ophelia Webb, a 70year-old retiree who was picking up trash and broken glass on the edges of a vacant high school near her home. She does this several days a week, wearing thick rubber gloves to protect her hands from the shards of glass. “Look at the blight all over,” she said. “You can see the condition of the city. What’s being done about it?”
It’s a good question. An essential question this election year.
The visual deterioration of Gary is stunning. It’s on a level beyond anything else in the state and it stops me cold every time I visit, though I spent 10 years here as a child in the 1970s and five as a cub reporter in the 1990s, back when Gary was routinely labeled the nation’s “murder capital.”
At 7th Avenue and Washington Street, I photographed a long-ago abandoned office building. Stretching almost an entire block, the yellow brick building is covered in graffiti, and every one of its dozens of windows is broken. Weeds, trash and tires filled the sidewalk in front, and graffiti inside advertised gangs such as the Vice Lords. “Angela is a heroin dealer,” someone painted on one wall, providing a phone number.
Blocks away, a towering and once majestic church is now vacant. Vacant so long that its roof is caving in, its windows are gone and chunks of limestone have crumbled from the exterior. Rare is a block that doesn’t feature an abandoned home, or more than one, in brutal disrepair.
The images are dramatic; one home I saw had split across the middle. The elementary school I attended in fourth grade nearly 40 years ago is now abandoned — faded plywood covers the windows, trash and broken glass fill the yard, and so many bricks have fallen off the building that there are huge holes in its walls.
BABY STEPS This is an American city. An Indiana city. A city that was sung about in The Music Man. And though baby steps toward progress have taken place in recent years — a casino provides tax revenue, the airport is growing, a strong mayor has been elected, and some abandoned properties have been demolished — the massive scope of the problems overwhelms any improvements.
The response: In election years, Democratic presidential and statewide candidates come looking for easy votes in this Democratic stronghold; Republicans largely stay away. There are no easy or quick fixes.
“I don’t know what the solution is,” said Mike Wright, 53, as he waited for a train to take him to his job in Chicago. “But I do know that we need a 20-year plan or a 30-year plan.”
I drove around Gary for hours, stopping to talk to residents at bus stops, businesses and work sites. I asked those I talked to about the state of the city, and the collective reaction can be summed up in the disappointed sighs and the are-you-crazy smiles that followed my questions. Then I asked what they’d say to a presidential candidate. The answers were the same you hear every election year in city after city. They’re only a bit more desperate here.
“Jobs,” Webb said as she picked up a broken bottle.
Carita Mitchell agreed. Too many young people have no real opportunities, she said as she stood in a transit center in the shadows of a steel mill that employs a fraction of the workers it did a generation or two ago. Like many others, she must catch a train to Chicago five days a week to find the work that is largely unattainable here.
The candidates, she said, “should be talking more about that instead of about each other. Why do I care about what they think of each other? It should be about jobs.”
Anyone running for president should take a close, honest look at the challenges Gary faces. Most important, they should offer more than just talk about the bold steps they will take to help save American cities like this one.