Much of what artist Lauren Pacheco cherishes about Gary, Indiana, can be seen from the sixth floor of the historic Gary State Bank building, where she is creating her Steel Studio. She hopes the space will draw fellow artists to this now-moribund industrial city built more than a century ago by U.S. Steel.
Past the gold-colored dome of City Hall, Ms. Pacheco looks out on the vacant convention center, which was designed by pioneering Black architect Wendell Campbell, a founder of the National Organization of Minority Architects. To the south are the historic Hotel Gary, transformed into housing for older people, and City Methodist Church, now a desolate Gothic-style ruin.
“People drive out to Gary and see nothing but blight,” says Ms. Pacheco, who grew up in Chicago and moved to Gary nine years ago. “I drive around and see nothing but potential.”
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Gary, Indiana, was once a symbol of America’s industrial might. One artist believes it’s ripe for rejuvenation.
Ms. Pacheco has devoted much of her considerable energy toward enlivening what she calls Gary’s “remarkable cultural heritage.”
In 2018, she launched the #PaintGary initiative, bringing 43 artists from Chicago and as far away as Thailand to create vibrant murals on abandoned buildings and in neglected public spaces, focusing on areas where visitors frequently arrive.
The following year, she established the Gary Public Art Archive and the companion Built Culture archive, both lively guides to the city’s past and present treasures. Among them is the bank building, which retains its imposing original vault in the basement. In a series of workshops she is planning for 2025, she will invite artists to “co-dream” with her about Gary and place their drawings of the city in the metal safe-deposit boxes that still line the vault.
Ms. Pacheco is equally at home as a curator and an educator. Her day job, to which she commutes twice a week, is as co-creative director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, a major cultural event. With her youngest brother, Peter Kepha, she is also co-organizer of the annual Slow & Low Chicago Lowrider Festival at Navy Pier.
Still, by far her most precious goal is “getting people to fall in love with Gary the way I did,” she says.
Situated on Lake Michigan about 30 miles southeast of Chicago’s Loop neighborhood, Gary was founded as a company town in 1906 and named for U.S. Steel Chairman Elbert Henry Gary. Since that time, Gary has morphed from Magic City and Steel City to acquire a more unfortunate nickname: Scary Gary. Once a symbol of America’s industrial might, this majority-Black city – famously known as the home of the Jackson Five – has been buffeted by economic disinvestment, poverty, and crime. The city has lost more than half its population since the 1960s – it’s now at 69,000 – with some 10,000 buildings sitting vacant and derelict. In recent years, landmarks such as Memorial Auditorium, where the Jackson Five performed, and the city’s iconic 1909-built water tower have been razed.
“We don’t have philanthropists and access to capital,” says Marlon R. Mitchell, president of the nonprofit Gary East Side Community Development Corporation. “#PaintGary murals have brought a positive spin to the neighborhood – people driving around the city try to find them, almost like a scavenger hunt.”
Some of the most powerful images created as part of the mural initiative reside on a haunting, decayed block of Edison Concept Houses, constructed in 1913 by a subsidiary of U.S. Steel from inventor Thomas Edison’s patent for single-pour concrete homes. On one of the residences’ battered surfaces, a mural by Nevada artist Erik “OverUnder” Burke depicts rapper Freddie Gibbs, a Gary native. Another recalls Chicago’s Red Summer of 1919, a period of deadly racial violence sparked by the killing of a 17-year-old Black boy whose raft drifted inadvertently into a white swimming area at a de facto segregated beach.
Former Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson had noticed striking murals going up around the city and initially had no idea who was behind them. She had long viewed art as a catalyst for economic development.
“Lauren is a real gift to Gary,” says Ms. Freeman-Wilson, now the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League. “Her work is not elite. [It’s] benefiting people from all over the city, including in the most impoverished and challenged neighborhoods. It’s lifted up Gary and the appreciation of the arts as a driver of the economy.”
Ms. Pacheco first heard about Miller Beach, a quiet, lakefront section of Gary, from several professors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her alma mater. She lives in that neighborhood with her husband – Phil Mullins, a retired community organizer – and their two pit bulls.
She grew up in Brighton Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side, part of one of the first Latino families in a largely Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Her father, Peter, was a sanitation worker and community activist who frequently brought home salvaged items, most notably claw-foot tubs and a metal water trough that doubled as a swimming pool.
“We grew up having a deep respect for the men and women who pick up the trash,” Ms. Pacheco says.
Her mother, Vivian, still lives in Chicago and avidly seeks out garage sales and flea markets. “The hunt is deeply rooted in all of us,” says Ms. Pacheco, a midcentury modern devotee whose studio is chock-full of bowling pins, vintage electric typewriters, trophies, books, encyclopedias salvaged from a shuttered library, and a Heywood-Wakefield dresser snapped up for $25 at Goodwill.
The demolition of the 1919 Brighton Park Theater, where she had watched cartoons as a child, “was an important moment,” Ms. Pacheco says. “Now, as an adult, I wonder: Was the community ever engaged in saving or reimagining it?”
She is especially focused on conserving two works by Black sculptor Richard Hunt, located inside and outside the transit center near Gary’s abandoned Union Station. The condition of Interchange, Mr. Hunt’s outdoor sculpture, is of particular concern; it was commissioned in 1985 and needs maintenance.
Driving from the Jackson Five’s childhood home to the shores of Lake Michigan, Ms. Pacheco says she remains inspired by her underdog of a city, a comeback kid ripe for rejuvenation. “It’s about shifting the perception from blight to bright,” she says.
