The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture's Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative has provided Gary residents with a preliminary look at its recommendations for remaking the city's troubled downtown.
The initiative, whose partnership with Gary was launched last month, wants to help the city promote density, preserve disused buildings and celebrate the area's unique history. Notre Dame's guidance was developed through a community development process that included a two community listening sessions in early August followed by a weeklong a design charrette, or intensive planning period, which concluded on Friday.
A 20-member team consisting of Notre Dame faculty and outside professionals studied an area centered on the intersection of Broadway and 5th Avenue. Once home to 50,000 people, the area's population has dwindled to just 2,500 in recent decades, with the local steel industry's shrinking presence largely to blame.
Marianne Cusato, a Notre Dame professor who serves as the Regeneration Initiative's director, gave a final overview of her team's progress to a standing room-only crowd at Gary's Centier Bank building.
The Notre Dame partnership builds on existing plans for downtown redevelopment, including plans years in the making for a new train station to replace the aging Gary Metro Center. Cusato presented the audience with early sketches of a new station that would straddle Broadway and create a "gateway" to the city for visitors.
While some of Notre Dame's proposals are concrete building projects, others are procedural. In their research, Cusato's team identified a barrier in Gary's zoning code that has left much of the city ineligible for residential development.
Residential lots in the city are smaller than in many of its peers, with an average width of just 30 feet. City rules on minimum house sizes and minimum setbacks mean that many small lots are not wide enough to accomodate houses of the prescribed size.
Updating the zoning code, Cusato said, is an essential step towards filling vacant lots and rejuvenating Gary's neighborhoods.
Another intervention the city can make to kickstart residential development is creating pre-approved construction plans that would give prospective homebuilders an expedited path through the approval process.
"The idea is there's a series of plans that have been designed and pre-vetted by the building department and the fire department and and zoning,"Cusato told The Times. "So the plan itself has already been thought through and it's a series of different building types that give you a range of options."
Also central to Notre Dame's work in Gary has been the question of what to do with the city's many abandoned and disused buildings, many of which are city-owned.
"Some of them are life-safety issues and there's nothing you can do about that," Cusato told the crowd. "But there are some that you can stabilize and maintain so we're going to put some strategies together for how how those buildings can be the tether from the past of the future."
For the structures that cannot be preserved, Cusato said that the city should consider deconstructing them and preserving the materials. Many of the materials used to build Gary's infrastructure still have value in the construction industry, and could provide a revenue stream for the city.
As prominent disused properties await redevelopment, Cusato proposed draping them with fabric screens printed with images of undamaged facades, hiding damaged brickwork and broken windows. The tactic would temporarily close the "open wounds" of blight, she said, and signal to prospective residents and developers that Gary is moving forward.
Similarly, Cusato suggested that installing printed vinyl panels on outside of the disused Genesis Convention Center could provide a display space for local artists while shifting focus away from the damaged building beneath.
Gary has secured the help of the State of Indiana in its bid to battle blight downtown. Senate Enrolled Act 434, a 2023 law authored by Gary Mayor Eddie Melton during his final year in the Indiana Senate, provides up to $3 million annually in state matching funds towards removing blighted structures. The first funds from the act are set to arrive in 2025.
One of Gary's most iconic derelicts was the subject of a specific proposal. Flanked by the Gary Housing Authority's Genesis Towers and the 21st Century Charter School, the crumbling City Methodist Church has been deteriorating since it closed in 1975. Cusato said that the tower at the church's southeast corner can likely be preserved, and could play an important role in Gary's new downtown.
After an 18-month process of permitting, partial demolition and landscaping, the tower could become the focal point of "City Renaissance Park," which would give Genesis Towers residents a shaded place to relax outdoors.
Whether Notre Dame's full plans for Gary will be realized is in large part a question of resources. A proposal for a museum highlighting Gary's role as a destination for Black Americans during the 20th Century's Great Migration received thunderous applause from Friday's crowd, but the vision can't be realized without a significant funding source.
Some aspects of the Initiative's plan already have some funding set aside. SEA 434 also provides state matching funds towards costs associated with a new downtown train station.
Cusato's team will present its plans to the city in a formal report, which she said will take several months to prepare. Cusato's team will provide guidance to city officials in the meantime as they work to implement high-priority parts of the plan.
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