In almost all posts that ask about naming a place they would never go and a shit place to go to this city comes up in abundance. So, why?

26 comments

  1. High crime and poverty rate, ugly, polluted and close to a much larger and more prosperous city, albeit one that has its own problems as well.

  5. It’s a shit town forsure but it’s literally no different than real shitty places across America lol

  6. Well to start, Gary, Indiana is Not Louisiana, Paris, France, New York, or Rome.

    But some do call it home sweet home.

  7. Pretty rundown, lots of abandoned buildings, some crime. It’s weird – as you drive south through Gary you start to get little pop ups of new builds/businesses until you hit Hobart. The Dunes area is nice though.

  8. Gary had a population of 178,000 in 1960 and in 2020 only 69,000 people lived there. Declining population brings abandoned buildings, depresses property value, diminishes the tax base. Abandoned buildings attract crime. It was essentially a U.S. steel company town, so when steel declined the town fell off a cliff.

  9. A large manufacturing city that lost huge numbers of jobs over the decades and has dealt with the fallout of unemployment, poverty, loss of tax base, etc. It’s really hard to maintain a city that has no work.

  13. High crime, high poverty, low schooling, even the adults weren’t well educated. If I wanted someone to fail in life they’d live in Gary.

  14. It was a former manufacturing city that experienced significant economic decline when the manufacturing industry went away and failed to attract new industries and jobs. It’s the story of many such towns in the “rust belt”, but Gary was one of the hardest hit.

  15. Gary has an Independent minor league baseball team that I enjoy watching. The games don’t sell out but they’re fairly popular among families, men and elderly couples.

    Other than that I don’t venture into Gary much. It was a beautiful, thriving city that didn’t manage to revive post globalization.

  17. Gary was a booming industrial town, like many other rust-belt towns, but instead of investing in other stuff, like museums, architecture, parks, universities, and so forth, they invested in the steel industry. When the steel industry went away, they had nothing. At that point, people started leaving to look for work elsewhere, which mostly left the people who couldn’t afford to leave. That’s not much of a tax base, so now they didn’t have the ability to invest in anything, and it pretty much turned into a giant swathe of abandoned warehouses and steel mills.

    Basically, take a large city, pull out the only source of jobs, and get the wealthier 60% of the people to leave. That’s Gary.

  18. Even I wouldn’t send you to Gary, Indiana… /R/Futurama.

    It was pretty gnarly in the 90s. It had a great mix of toxic industries mixed with murder and malaise. I hear things have gotten a little better since then.

  20. I have a lot of long haul trucker buddies. They all say the same thing: They will NOT drive through Gary, IN. Period.

  22. Its pretty exaggerated online based on what Gary was 10-20 years ago. Most people’s experience with Gary is transiting through it on their way to Chicago and elsewhere and the look from the Interstate is not great. You get a nice, big view of the steel plant. Most of the notable abandoned buildigns downtown have been torn down and some have even been re-developed.

    Several comments mentioned that industry left. It was founded as a Steel town, and its still the largest employer. But steel has become more automated and more high tech so you don’t need just generic laborers working the plant.

    This isn’t to dismiss the very many concerns Gary is facing, but its not all that dissimilar to any other Rust Belt city. It even has its nice neighborhoods, like [Morningside](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5320373,-87.3386236,3a,75y,163.18h,85.93t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1snwv4gF5xnYw38dJhaxTq_g!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Dnwv4gF5xnYw38dJhaxTq_g%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D343.87848%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&entry=ttu) and [Miller Beach](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6162673,-87.2689148,3a,75y,263.21h,81.99t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1spPyW6Lprm8EaGlga0dEIQg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DpPyW6Lprm8EaGlga0dEIQg%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D134.20818%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i3328!8i1664?hl=en&entry=ttu), but that doesn’t make good YouTube video.

  23. It is a shithole. I grew up 20 minutes from there. In the 90s the Gary police put up billboards on interstate 94 urging motorists to PLEASE not get off at Gary exits..

  25. Gary Indiana was a working class steel town in the first half of the 20th century. The steel industry declined and now the town has fallen on hard times. I’ve been there, and it’s not exactly a nice place, the only businesses i saw were like payday loans and fast food, but the whole “dont stop at a red light or people will steal your hubcaps” thing is really dumb. It’s sort of become a big internet punching bag which sucks and is kind of classist.

  26. In the early 2000s, I worked for a company that had it’s headquarters near Gary, IN. While I worked at a different branch, I did spend some time in the area.

    First, let me start by saying I knew a lot of people who were from Gary. Lots of nice, honorable, hard working people. Good people. Nice people. And that’s an important thing to remember: there are a lot of good people who are stuck in Gary, and who have had to sell their houses at cut rates to get out of Gary.

    Gary was a boom town, that was fueled by Steel. It was on the lake, so lake freighters could deliver in the iron ore and coal needed, and it could ship out the steel on the railroad, to Detroit, where it was turned into cars.

    It lived on cheap shipping.

    But then the demand for steel in the USA dropped, because shipping got really cheap, and you could ship steel in from anywhere – Ohio, Pittsburgh, or China. And you could ship in the stuff that you make from steel really cheap too.

    And then automation happened. The works used to employ 30,000 people, now, it’s under 2500. Yes, the Gary works are still producing a lot of steel, they just aren’t using as many people to do it.

    Not only did the city lose the 27,500 jobs at the plant, they also lost the jobs of the people who made those people sandwiches, who rung them up at the cash registers, who maintained their homes.

    So far, fairly typical rust belt stuff. Sad, but repeated over and over again all over the upper midwest.

    What really fucked Gary over though… they got scammed. A flim flam con man moved in, and convinced them that if they let him build a casino, he’d host some events, and Gary’s fortunes would turn around.

    That didn’t work out so well, and it completely destroyed what little was left of the economy in Gary. It went so bad that when they made Back to the Future 2, the whole Biff plotline was based on this asshole and what he did to Gary. Hill Valley was based on Gary, and Biff Tanner was based on the con man, Donald Trump.

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