A postcard from Gary

Gary, Indiana was built on purpose, in 1906, by a steel company that needed somewhere for the steel to happen. That is a rarer origin than it sounds. Most towns accumulate. Gary was drawn, sited, and named after a chairman of the board, which is the least romantic founding story available and also completely honest about what the twentieth century actually was.

It sits on the southern shore of Lake Michigan with the Indiana Dunes to one side and Chicago glittering thirty miles up the shoreline, close enough to be permanently compared to and never confused with. The comparison has not been kind. It rarely is, when the other party is Chicago.

What is actually there

A lakefront. Dunes that are a national park, which surprises people who have only read headlines. A grid of streets laid out by someone with a ruler and a deadline. And the specific quiet of a place that was once at the centre of the most important industrial economy on earth and is now mostly left to get on with it.

We do not print a shirt for Gary as a comment. We print it because a city that made the steel for a century of American building is a city that earned a souvenir, and nobody in the souvenir business was ever going to get around to it. The reverence is the point. A town does not stop deserving commemoration because its best decade is behind it — by that standard almost nowhere qualifies, including most of the places that sell keychains.

Greetings from Gary. It is on a great lake. It made the steel. That is the shirt.