Gary, Indiana, and the Long Shadow of U.S. Steel

U.S. Steel mines iron ore in Minnesota and sends it across Lake Superior on freighters a thousand feet long. At Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the ships enter the Soo Locks, which provide passage to the lower Great Lakes. Five hundred billion dollars’ worth of ore (and ninety-five per cent of the United States’ supply) annually moves through the locks, which have been managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1881. The Minnesota ships travel the long, dangling length of Lake Michigan and dock at its southern tip: Gary, Indiana.

Two days after Christmas, a ship called the Presque Isle sat in the slip at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in North America. “Looks like it just came in—it’s riding low,” Daniel Killeen, the vice-president of Gary Works, told Eddie Melton, the mayor of Gary. Melton and I were in a company van, touring the steelyard—eternal mud, crisscrossed with the tire tracks of massive machines. We passed conical piles of raw materials—the plant uses manganese, limestone, sinter, coke—and neat stacks of the finished product, steel slabs. Each slab measures about nine inches thick, six feet wide, and thirty feet long, and can be heated to twenty-four hundred degrees and pressed like pasta dough to make panels that are used in automobile manufacturing. (A top customer is Toyota.) The mill also makes tin and chrome for Campbell’s soup and for various bottlers. “During COVID, the chrome line was just crazy,” Killeen said. “Lysol cans.” Gary Works produces six million tons of steel per year. The chimneys ever churn. One recent night, a russet haze hovered above an enormous flame atop a prominent stack, and a Gary native told me that when he was little his father used to say, “That’s what keeps us warm.” All over town, you can smell the emissions, or not; a steelworker said that locals get used to the stench the way a cook no longer smells his kitchen, or a smoker no longer smells his clothes.

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The Mayor, who turned forty-four in January, is built like a college quarterback, which he once was. He had on top-rimmed eyeglasses and a steelworker uniform the color of a traffic cone. The back of his fire-retardant jacket read “USS.” Gary Works’ chief of security and safety, Terry Carter, had issued the workwear to us, along with reinforced boots, hard hats, goggles, earplugs, and white padded gloves that reminded me of the kind worn by cartoon M&M’s. Melton, who grew up in Gary, had not been inside the steel mill since a class field trip in elementary school. He told Killeen, “I remember seeing a slab come in—you just felt that heat come off of it.”

Steel is an alloy: iron plus carbon. It appears throughout the man-made world, in bridges, skyscrapers, railroads, battleships, washing machines, saucepans, scalpels, staples. The U.S.’s ability to mass-produce steel accelerated in 1856, after the invention of a relatively inexpensive purification process, and intensified during the Second World War. U.S. Steel, which is based in Pittsburgh, became the country’s first billion-dollar company. It was founded in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie and others; financed by J. P. Morgan; presided over by Charles Schwab; and supported by John D. Rockefeller, who had the ore deposits. In 1905, U.S. Steel’s inaugural chairman, Elbert H. Gary, announced plans to build “a plant of the most modern standards”—the eponymous factory that Melton was now touring, in the eponymous city that Melton now ran.

At Gary Works, steel is still made the way it always has been. Ore is fed into the top of a bottle-shaped stack, called a blast furnace, whose interior is lined with refractory brick. Vents, or tuyeres, shoot superheated, super-oxygenated air into the bottom of the stack, creating a chemical reaction that liquifies the ore. Every ten to twenty years, a blast furnace must be relined, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Gary Works has been planning to refurbish blast furnace No. 14—“the star of the show,” as one steelworker described it to me—though steelmakers are being urged to abandon blast furnaces (which are traditionally fuelled by coking coal) and to embrace environmentally friendlier options (hydrogen; electric-arc furnaces). A staggering ten per cent of the planet’s carbon-dioxide emissions comes from steel factories. Paradoxically, steel, which is a critical component in electric vehicles and wind turbines, factors into the clean-energy transition.

After ore is melted, it gets poured through the hatch of an immense, space-capsule-looking thing called a submarine ladle, or “sub,” which is then sent down a rail. Killeen took Melton and me to a building marked “Pig Iron Caster No. 1.” We walked through a clanking hangar with corrugated walls, cement floors, and yellow guardrails, and came to the ladle track, below which stood a spouted basin, below which moved a conveyor belt of empty molds, turning on itself like a bicycle chain. The sub eased down the rail, holding a hundred and fifty tons of molten iron. It stopped above the basin. A siren went off. The sub tilted toward us, glacially. An orange glow appeared, and then a flame. A neon bead formed at the lip of the hatch and became an orange stripe and then a deluge. Killeen said, “That is a hundred per cent iron, but it flows exactly like water.”

Seeing iron pour is like watching lava and a fireworks show combined. Embers shot to the floor and fizzled as the torrent passed from basin to mold. A “Star Wars” character—a steelworker dressed head to toe in protective silvers—materialized, poking at the flow with a long stick. The filled molds moved down the line like mutant blister packs of tangerine gum. They passed through cooling water and were eventually flipped like fresh-baked cakes, each now a fifty-pound block, known as a pig. Killeen walked us to the end of the line and picked up a pig that had been there for a while, then passed it to the Mayor, who tested its weight in his hands. Melton is the twenty-second leader of a place that both needs and has been devastated by the industry that created it, and he was thinking about the contours of that.

When Eddie Melton became Gary’s mayor, in late 2023, the population had fallen by forty per cent from its twentieth-century peak.

U.S. Steel laid out Gary in homage to its original home, New York City. The cornerstone streets are Broadway and Fifth Avenue, and the downtown core consists of long rectangular blocks more typical of Manhattan than of the Midwest. Fifth Avenue runs parallel to the lakeshore. Broadway runs perpendicular to Fifth. Domed, neoclassical landmarks—the Lake County courthouse and City Hall—went up on either side of Broadway, forming a sort of city gate.

In 1913, the U.S. Department of Commerce put out a short silent film, selling U.S. Steel as a path to the American Dream. The film opens on a peasant couple summoning their son from a farm field. He sets aside his wheelbarrow to open a handwritten letter: “Ya poslavam peňize, dej pozor a přt hnět, twuj brater,” Czech for “I am sending money, be careful and come right away, your brother.” He packs and kisses his parents goodbye; the next frame reads, “HE ARRIVES IN AMERICA.” At U.S. Steel, the young farmer finds work amid planers, circular saws, emery wheels, belts and pulleys, mega-magnets, giant hooks, and furnaces. Within six years, success. He marries a pretty teacher who shows her students how to write, in English, “I live here.” The couple has a nice house and a son, who attends “THE MODEL SCHOOL.” This refers to the Ralph Waldo Emerson School, where William Wirt, Gary’s first schools superintendent, pioneered the work-study-play system, yielding a universe of public schools with gyms, auditoriums, swimming pools, vocational shops, band, recess, art. “Think about it,” Christopher Harris, Gary’s executive director of redevelopment, told me the other day as we sat outside the original school building, in the back of the Mayor’s chauffeured car. “You had this new, twentieth-century city that was being built by U.S. Steel. How could you not have the most innovative educational system for all these new workers and immigrants?”