Urban explorers find beauty in the decay of Gary, Indiana's abandoned buildings

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Beauty, and rebirth, in decay. It's a vision of urban exploration, restoration, and development now under way across Northwest Indiana.

Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: It's an American ruin, the once grand long-abandoned City Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana, extraordinary details still hidden in plain sight everywhere.

Lori Gonzalez, Decay Devils: It's still beautiful.

Jeffrey Brown: Look at that window. Wow.

Even as the roofless structure itself barely offers cover from the pouring rain. Our guides, Gary natives Tyrell Anderson and Lori Gonzalez, urban explorers who've been visiting buildings like this for more than a decade, taking photographs, and, crucially, documenting the history.

Lori Gonzalez: There's still beauty in destruction. Like, if you see it and you see all these, like, different beautiful things, you can imagine what it used to look like in its heyday.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Tyrell Anderson, Decay Devils: You know that it's not going to be a church as though it once was. But how can you -- can you beautify any aspect of it to tell the history side of it?

Jeffrey Brown: A history that for this church dates to 1926, with decades as a segregated, whites-only congregation before eventually closing its doors in 1975.

Tyrell Anderson: They refused to integrate, so when people began to move out, their congregation numbers dwindled.

Jeffrey Brown: It's in some ways a microcosm of Gary's history, an industrial city that's lost more than half its population since the 1960s, driven by fewer steel jobs and white flight.

Today, there are some 10,000 abandoned buildings throughout the city, including Union Station, making Gary something of a mecca for people like Lori and Tyrell who are drawn to urbex, or urban exploration.

I saw on the back of your sweatshirt it says, "I play in abandoned buildings." So this began sort of as a kind of play?

Tyrell Anderson: Yes.

Lori Gonzalez: Yes. Yes. Like, get your camera, jump in a car or rent a car and just go.

Jeffrey Brown: More than a decade ago, Lori and Tyrell became the backbone of an informal group that called themselves Decay Devils, traveling to cities like Detroit and far beyond to explore and photograph abandoned structures.

Tyrell Anderson: It kind of morphed from just buildings because it was like, well, these places kind of have a bad rap. Well, let's go and learn more about the people and the cuisine and everything else. And it was like...

Jeffrey Brown: And the history.

Tyrell Anderson: Oh, these people are like really cool people. And so it actually helped us, like, kind of pivot from just going to take pictures and eating to, OK, tell us how you all did this and where did you get the money from? How did you bring this together?

Jeffrey Brown: In 2015, Decay Devils became a formal nonprofit, now focused on preserving and even restoring structures in and around Gary, its first project, this train station built with steel reinforced concrete in 1910 just four years after the city was founded.

The station closed in the early 1970s, and after decades of neglect Decay Devils acquired it in 2018 for just $10.

Tyrell Anderson: These tunnels actually used to lead to boarding platforms.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

They have spent years volunteering and raising money to get the outside and inside of the station mostly cleared out.

Lori Gonzalez: When I first saw it cleaned out, I was like, I could do cartwheels. It was so clear from not being able to walk in safely and then seeing it now.

Jeffrey Brown: It is safe to be in here?

Lori Gonzalez: No, not really.

(Laughter)

Tyrell Anderson: Not safe.

(Laughter)

Lori Gonzalez: We should be wearing some hardhats.

Jeffrey Brown: The group estimates it will cost at least $6 million to make the space functional, the hope to turn it into a visitors center with a cafe and space for local vendors and artists.

Tyrell Anderson: We're looking at well over 20,000 people traversing this area a day. Let's make this a place that they need to stop.

Jeffrey Brown: Selling a vision for an abandoned building in a city where the percentage of people in poverty is nearly three times higher than the national rate is an uphill battle.

Eunice Trotter, Indiana Landmarks: This church was designed by a modernist architect.

Jeffrey Brown: But Eunice Trotter, who heads the Black History Preservation Program of the private nonprofit Indiana Landmarks, says efforts in cities like Gary are crucial.

Eunice Trotter: As the buildings are erased, so does the history follow. It becomes less and less known.

Jeffrey Brown: We sat down with Trotter at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, a historically Black congregation with a meticulously maintained building that's received support from Indiana Landmarks.

Eunice Trotter: What you see when you drive around Gary, the many abandoned sites, is the result of disinvestment. Gary is just the best example of the need for Black heritage preservation.

Jeffrey Brown: Trotter points to another large building in Gary under threat, also with a rich history for the city's Black community. Built in 1930 as one of three high schools in the state for Black students during segregation, Gary Roosevelt High School housed more than 3,000 students at its peak, a hub of Gary's Black middle class.

But after shrinking enrollment and decades of deferred maintenance, a failing heat system caused pipes to burst in 2019. It's been vacant since then.

Marlon Mitchell, Gary East Side Community Development Corporation: Here, a very rich culture was built on Black excellence and professionalism. And that's what the school really stands for. We had a fairly good swim team.

Jeffrey Brown: Marlon Mitchell graduated from Gary Roosevelt in 1989. He now heads a local economic development corporation that has partnered with Indiana Landmarks to explore other uses for the school.

Marlon Mitchell: We knew that it wasn't going to be a school anymore. The population couldn't support that. But Roosevelt as a school, as an institution meant so much to the community that the community should decide what happens to this building.

Jeffrey Brown: In May, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Gary Roosevelt one of America's 11 most endangered historic places.

Marlon Mitchell: This building has much more life left if we breathe into it.

Eunice Trotter: We can use some of that space for museum space. We could use some of that space for a hotel, for an event center, for artists, and on and on. That's a site that has many, many more years of life with a little love. And that love is at the tune of $20 million.

Jeffrey Brown: Twenty million dollars.

Eunice Trotter: Twenty million dollars

Jeffrey Brown: Which is a lot of money in a place like Gary...

Eunice Trotter: It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money.

Jeffrey Brown: ... where there are a lot of other needs.

Eunice Trotter: There is a lot of money. But we believe that restoring that school will ignite tremendous restoration for Gary.

Jeffrey Brown: And that's the goal for Tyrell, Lori and Decay Devils as well, turning their efforts from just play to rebirth and development of their city through reimagining these buildings.

Tyrell Anderson: The city has a lot more to offer. It's a huge city. Your main thoroughfare might have some abandonment around it. You just automatically assume that that's what's going to be where you inside the neighborhoods. And that's not the case.

Lori Gonzalez: Like, there's people that live here. We're not a ghost town.

Jeffrey Brown: Tyrell looks to a world-famous model of what can happen with ruins.

Tyrell Anderson: We don't really think about it. But that is what the Colosseum is. You get to walk around and look.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: Yes, it is a ruin.

Tyrell Anderson: That's it. It is a ruin. But we know that there is energy here. It's just along the lines of, how do you properly monetize it and use it to help other things be developed?

Jeffrey Brown: It's a grand dream, now a challenge for Decay Devils and the boosters of Gary's historic buildings.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown inside the ruins of City Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana.