paperback
227 pages
published in 1986
They called it the "Magic City" in the early years of the twentieth century. The label, of course, was little more than a real estate fantasy, and few would argue that the place has much magic in the 1980s. Like dozens of declining industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast, the steel city of Gary, Indiana, has been buffeted by the powerful winds of twentieth‐ century change. Indeed, the history of Gary provides, in microcosm, a view of the rise and fall of the American industrial city. More than that, it illuminates many of the patterns of urban growth and change in this century—the impact of planning, of industrial development, of European immigration, of black migration from the South, and of more recent demographic, economic, and political shifts.