Since I finished my last final, I've been extremely bored. How board, you ask? So bored that I drove to Gary, Indiana, to see what was there. It turns out that there isn't much. The above photo is of the "windows" above the Palace Theatre, which improbably advertised "Jackson Five, Tonight" on its tattered marquee.
These windows remind me of the apartment buildings I passed as my school bus took me up the Bronx's Major Deegan Expressway in the early '80s and late '90s. Someone decided on a shortcut to the "broken windows" school of urban renewal - painting happy scenes in boarded-up windows instead of doing the hard work of trying to create them in real life. Since then, the buildings along the Deegan have been fixed up and there are actual people behind actual windows. The Palace, which closed in 1972, is still abandoned.
All told, Gary is a ghost town. Despite arriving on a sunny Sunday afternoon, the streets and roads were almost completely empty. Downtown, the only buildings that look as they have been touched in decades are City Hall, a Brutalist convention center and the minor league ballpark. Otherwise, it's a ghost town - like ancient ruins with less marble and no gift shop.
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