Gary is both famous and infamous. It's the "just one place that can light my face" and "home sweet home" effusively described in the song of the same name from the 1957 musical The Music Man. It's the childhood home of Michael, Tito, Jermaine, and the rest of the Jackson family. It's also home to an unattractive and often industrial-smelling stretch of highway east of Chicago, and has repeatedly ranked first in the nation among large cities for homicides per capita.
When designing the city, the U.S. Steel Corporation bragged that its engineers "took for their guidance the motto that hangs in the office of the big company's chief executive, "It can be done," and made Gary at least an attractive, if not a beautiful, residential town," and posited Gary as evidence that "management has always shown its realization of the fact that "not by bread alone does man live"; that the mere paying of employees a living wage is not sufficient, and that even the least educated worker has an aesthetic sense, even though often uncultivated, that should be developed and pandered to within reasonable limits if the best good of the worker and the employer is to be achieved." As U.S. Steel began to struggle in the late 1960s, the city's economy followed, and it has yet to recover.
Two casinos, legalized in Gary out of sheer desperation, make it a destination for gamblers on short trips and locals on pay-day . Its crumbling architectural heritage also makes it a favorite ? and dangerous ? destination for urban exploration.
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Gary
Where To Stay & Best Hotels in Gary - updated May 2024
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Gary Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
