The Company Town by Hardy Green Page B

American “self-helpfulness” prompted Vandergrift workers to build their own houses, Buffington said. Surely that impulse, the
town’s homeowner spirit, and its company loyalty could be duplicated at Gary, the corporation figured.
    Accordingly, it established the independent Gary Land Co., resembling the Vandergrift Land and Improvement Co., under executive Horace S. Norton. Following a $7.2 million anonymous land purchase of nearly twenty square miles, including eight miles of Lake Michigan shore frontage, the Gary Land Co. filled in seven hundred feet of the lake, dredged a twenty-five-foot ship canal a mile inland, and relocated a straightened and narrowed Grand Calumet River a half mile southward. Indiana Steel, with its eight blast furnaces, fifty-six open hearths, coke ovens, and the largest rail mill in the world, was the first plant to be constructed and became the nucleus of the industrial complex. It would be flanked by American Sheet and Tin Plate’s factory and that of National Tube, with the Universal Portland Cement factory located farther to the west along the shore. Located slightly inland were the American Bridge and American Locomotive plants. The Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway—which circled Chicago’s outer rim and connected the Gary Works with Illinois Steel finishing plants in south Chicago—located its terminal yards at the southwest corner of the industrial area. 10
    As for the town, the Land Co. hired no city planners, merely turning over the layout to engineer A. P. Melton. There would be no curvilinear boulevards or pastoral inspiration in Gary. Instead, Melton plotted the town as an unvarying grid centered on an axis of Broadway—the thoroughfare that ran straight south from the front entrance of the Indiana Steel plant—and the east-west commercial street called Fifth Avenue. The avenues south of Fifth would simply be numbered; the streets running parallel to Broadway would get the names of U.S. presidents and states. The Land Co. built a sewer system sufficient for a city of 200,000 and later would donate land for schools, churches, a library, a hospital, and municipal buildings.
    By June 1906, hundreds of men were at work building the new town. Adjacent to each company’s property, Melton plotted subdivisions for its workers’ homes. The first subdivision, intended for Indiana Steel, consisted of eight hundred acres immediately to the south of the mill site, plotted into 4,000 lots. Streets were graded and paved, concrete sidewalks
built, sewers dug, and electric and gas lines installed. Lot-sale agreements stipulated simply that building plans had to be approved by an agent of the Land Co., that houses had to be completed within twelve to eighteen months, and that, with very few exceptions, no liquor could be sold. (Five sites obtained exemptions from this prohibition, Buffington explained, as a safety valve necessary to a large town, since the foreign element “would otherwise be enticed to groggeries of the lowest type.”) But unlike in Vandergrift, this near-laissez-faire approach was not greeted with an explosion of home-building. Instead, within three years only 250 private homes had been constructed.
    Consequently, the Gary Land Co. soon found itself in the home-construction business, erecting around eight hundred homes that rented for anywhere from $42 to $14 per month. Many of these were houses of five to ten rooms, and, as in Vandergrift proper, the rents made them affordable only to executives and the most skilled workers. Beginning in 1909, the company built three hundred apartment houses for workers at American Bridge and more than one hundred single homes for American Sheet and Tin Plate employees.
    It was a departure when the company constructed fifty uniform, wood-frame, four-room houses in a corner of the first subdivision. With rents a bit lower—$12 to $13 per month—less-skilled, lower-paid workers could afford to