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Type “Gary, Indiana” into a search bar and you’ll get abandoned buildings. Drone footage of the old Methodist church with trees growing through the roof. Somebody’s ten-minute video calling us the most miserable city in America.
Almost none of it is made by anyone from here.
I was born in Gary. My family is from Gary. I’m going to answer the question people actually type into Google — what happened to Gary, Indiana? — and then I’m going to tell you the part the drone footage always leaves out.
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I Left Gary. Gary Never Left Me.
Every morning I load up my truck and carry other people’s lives to their doors.
Bills. Birthday cards. The letter somebody’s been waiting three weeks for. I bring it all up the walk — good news and hard news the same. You learn something about people carrying their mail. Everybody’s holding onto somewhere. A return address. A hometown. A place they came from that still has a grip on them, whether they’d say it out loud or not.
Mine is Gary, Indiana. And it’s had...

When the Smoke Hit Gary: Why I Had to Tell This Story
I was born in 1972, in a city that was loud, proud, and unapologetically Black. Gary, Indiana didn’t have to explain itself to anybody. The steel mills ran around the clock, the sky stayed heavy with that gray industrial haze, and to us, that smoke didn’t mean pollution — it meant paychecks. It meant Daddy was working. It meant we were going to eat.
That’s the Gary I was raised in. And that’s the Gary I had to write about.
A City Built on...