Gary Union Station

Gary Union Station opened in 1910 at 251 North Broadway, four years after U.S. Steel platted the city south of its Gary Works mill. ^[1] The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad built it as a gift to the new city and shared it with the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, whose elevated tracks flank the site; a passenger depot and a smaller freight depot were joined by a raised platform, and by 1915 tunnels ran beneath the tracks to stairs at platform grade. ^[1] The designer was Maurice Alvin Long, the B&O’s lead building architect, working with Chicago’s Leonard Construction Company — a name frequently misprinted as M. A. Lang. ^[1] Long executed the Beaux-Arts vocabulary entirely in poured-in-place reinforced concrete rather than limestone: rusticated pilasters, arched windows with raised keystones, an ornamented entablature, and GARY carved into the frieze above the entrance, with only the cartouche precast and lifted into place. ^[1] The technique was near-experimental in 1910 and is the reason the shell still stands. ^[2]

The station carried steelworkers, arriving immigrants, and wartime servicemen, with through service to New York, Jersey City, Baltimore, Washington, Boston, Buffalo, and Detroit. ^[3] Unlike most American depots, it held its traffic well into the automobile era, sustained by commuting between Gary, Hammond, and Chicago, and in 1957 it actually absorbed passenger service consolidated from other railroads. ^[1] The reprieve was brief. Ridership fell through the 1960s, and in 1971 the creation of Amtrak ended all service on the lines the building served; what little Amtrak traffic remained in Gary moved to the former Pennsylvania Railroad station on 5th Street, since demolished. ^[1] Union Station sat empty for the next half century, losing its windows, its plaster ceilings, and eventually its roof, and Indiana Landmarks named it one of the state’s 10 Most Endangered Places. ^[3] It appeared on film twice along the way, in Appointment with Danger in 1951 and Original Gangstas in 1996. ^[1]

The Decay Devils, a Gary preservation and urban exploration group, took ownership in 2018 and secured the building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places on June 6, 2019. ^[1] Volunteers cleared the grounds, uncovered the original brick paving, added murals, a garden, and an interpretive marker, backed by the Legacy Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and U.S. Steel. ^[2] In September 2023 the group broke ground with Digital Equity LLC on an $8 million conversion into a fiber-optics training center, but the anchor tenant withdrew the following spring and the rehabilitation was paused — by the group’s own count, the third failed restoration attempt since 2002. ^{[4] [5]} Fundraising relaunched in late 2024, seeking roughly $2 million toward a multi-use conversion of the 4,000-square-foot main building. ^[6]