r/geography Aug 19 '24

Why doesn’t Indiana have a major city along Lake Michigan? Discussion

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I’ve always found it unique that Indiana’s biggest city is in the middle of the state and not along Lake Michigan. Why is that the case?

It’s even more interesting when you think of how Chicago is a stones throw away from Indiana, yet it seems like Indiana’s biggest city on Lake Michigan is Gary (please correct me if I’m wrong) which has a population of 70K. Still a lot for sure, but I honestly would have thought there would be a be a town that can compare to something like Buffalo with a few hundred thousand people.

Thanks for any and all responses!

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u/drmobe Aug 19 '24

Gary used to be a lot bigger when the steel mill was doing well

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u/myersjw Aug 19 '24

Correct. Gary was poised for a while to be chicagos little sister. A significant amount of development took place, expensive homes and even talks of some professional sports franchises. I know most people’s view on the city is mostly as a meme now but it’s still got some remnants of beautiful architecture and the beach community in Miller is stunning

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u/JosephMadeCrosses Aug 19 '24

Go Railcats!

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u/Bob_Majerle Aug 19 '24

Anybody been to a game there? I’ve always wanted to go but…. its in Gary haha

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u/iama_triceratops Aug 20 '24

It’s a great place to watch a game. No problems around the stadium area. Nobody is looking for trouble there on game days and I think the city makes sure to keep a closer eye on things during games. Highly recommend going if you’re interested in minor league baseball. One of the cool things about the Railcats is that they are an independent team. There is no major league affiliate like most other minor league teams.

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u/Phog_of_War Aug 20 '24

Followed my Redhawks to Gary. Great weekend and I felt no more at risk than maybe walking in downtown Minneapolis.

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u/cathyimlost Aug 20 '24

Go Redhawks! I have since moved to Saint Paul and I really enjoyed games here back when they were still in the AA. Obviously they have gone bigtime now and it is still fun but I do miss the independent days and I still have a soft spot for Newman Outdoor Field.

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u/Distortedhideaway Aug 20 '24

Miller Beach is such a strange little pocket. Surrounded by boarded up buildings, gas stations, and liquor storeswith bullet proof glass... take a left turn, and it's this adorable beach community.

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u/NotElizaHenry Aug 20 '24

Holy shit, this just solved a mystery that’s been floating around my brain for years. I went to Gary once to buy a piece of furniture I found on Craigslist and my friends were like “yikes, don’t get murdered, take a rape whistle.” But then when I got there it was this sweet little hipster place with a record store and boba tea?? When I got back home with my credenza I tried to tell my friends how cute Gary was and everyone just looked at me like I was high.

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u/Ok_Mistake_2211 Aug 20 '24

I recently stayed in Gary at Miller Beach (alone as a young female) and walked around, hung out on the beach all day alone and had a wonderful time. It is a really cute quaint beach town, I even met a family from Colorado that spends all summer there.

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u/Free-Pudding-2338 Aug 19 '24

Yeah the sad tale of Gary and the hubris of its leadership.

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u/bsukenyan Aug 20 '24

Hubris of its leaders? More like the way it was strung out and bled to death by the state. Bad leadership played its part, sure, but the state stole and misappropriated funds meant to keep the city alive and there were never any repercussions save for the tarnished name of the city.

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u/Initial-Fishing4236 Aug 20 '24

Having a Main Street that goes directly into a carcinogenic death trap. The massive scale of environmental destruction. Literally building their houses on sand. Sorta hubristic, yes.

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u/bsukenyan Aug 20 '24

All built up by US Steel, as Gary was originally a company town. There’s a difference between US Steel leadership and the actual city’s leadership when it was able to be separated from the company that started it. At a point there is an issue of working with the cards you were dealt, as there’s no doubt that building houses on sand isn’t great but that doesn’t change the fact that the infrastructure of Gary should’ve been kept up by the state and funds were stolen and misappropriated and that has nothing to do with the mayor or city council of Gary.

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '24

Part of a city government’s job is to encourage and promote the diversification of the economy to prevent the exact situation of Gary from occurring. It’s like your town getting an Amazon fulfillment center, your city government starts spending money to improve the city around the fulfillment center to the point your Main Street leads to the fulfillment center and you’re trying to accommodate Amazon as much as possible to keep their operations profitable and maybe encourage other logistics companies to move in. Suddenly Amazon figures out autonomous delivery, fires 75% of its staff, and you have no other industries around it.

City government failed by not doing more to capitalize on what it currently had because it thought the steel industry was always going to be solid.

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u/Initial-Fishing4236 Aug 20 '24

Oh no, as soon as Gary got “darker”, the state money fled as quickly as the white people

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u/DaHick Aug 20 '24

In the 90's I was doing OEM work on lake boats - the big ones. That look in the night with the steel mill going full bore was downright spooky. The crew would always tell us not to get off the boat in Gary (We got land breaks when loading and offloading). But two harbors was fine.

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u/Cartography-Day-18 Aug 20 '24

Sounds like an opportunity

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u/the_YellowRanger Aug 20 '24

Glad to hear that because the drive through it is kinda scary.

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u/tushshtup Aug 20 '24

Balls deep has an amazing episode there

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u/Traditional_Key_763 Aug 20 '24

had a fully built up street car system purely because someone tried to build a railroad absolutely straight from NY to Chicago starting in Gary then ran out of cash

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u/asevans48 Aug 20 '24

Steel and industry collapsed there after the 1960s. Racism didnt help. Not sure where the bs on the rest of the thread is from. The city's decline as with other chicago area post-industrial disasters and the city of detroit are well known and documented.

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u/kuntrycid Aug 20 '24

The riots hurt Gary a lot. It took a lot of years to recover and rebuild property that was destroyed at that time.

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u/CarelessInevitable26 Aug 19 '24

Will never forget the site of catching the train past Gary. Looks like an apocalyptic industrial wasteland.

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u/koushakandystore Aug 20 '24

For sure. I once took a greyhound from Boston to Chicago. We passed through Gary at around 2 am and indeed it did in fact look like an apocalyptic wasteland. The bright yellow lights from the sides of brick buildings illuminated miles of low slung houses and derelict factories with steam rising from smokestacks in the distance. It looked otherworldly.

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u/Druidicflow Aug 20 '24

Gary Indiana, Gary Indiana, not Louisiana, Paris France, New York, or Rome

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u/ejbrds Aug 20 '24

Surprised I had to get so far down the comments to find this!

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u/Druidicflow Aug 20 '24

Honestly, I don’t even remember where it’s from. The Music Man?

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u/ejbrds Aug 20 '24

Oh yeah!! That was little Ronny Howard’s big song in the movie!

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u/justduett Aug 20 '24

I was going to be disappointed if no one quoted Harold Hill or the Music Man, rather.

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u/SylvanTerra Aug 20 '24

The steel mill is still doing well. The issue is greater efficiency and automation decimated the workforce needed to operate it going from over 30k to now 2-2.5k.

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u/Pringles-Melchior99 Aug 19 '24

Is Gary the one where it’s a lot of abandoned houses?

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u/chechifromCHI Aug 19 '24

Yes. Where Michael Jackson is from. And an okay place to buy cigarettes because they're so damn expensive here in Chicago.

It's a rough place, but it has Miller beach and the neighborhood around it which is pretty safe and gorgeous. Some very good people there but yes it is very blighted and many areas are fairly abandoned.

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u/LetoPancakes Aug 19 '24

also Freddy Gibbs is from there, for the hiphop heads

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u/MikeStini Aug 19 '24

Scary Gary. I love his story he told on Joe Rogan about shooting a crackhead in Gary.

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u/HoustonHyphy Aug 19 '24

There’s an animated video on YouTube about Freddie telling the story of Michael Jackson coming back to Gary and getting KFC that’s hilarious

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u/GlassClass1198 Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 20 '24

Scary Gary n***a my neighborhood something like Fallujah

-Freddie Gibbs - Palmolive

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u/GloriousMemelord Aug 19 '24

It’s calmed down a lot from when I was a kid. Back in the 90s through the 2000s it was pretty violent. Still plenty of violence, but it’s mostly empty now

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u/chechifromCHI Aug 19 '24

Yeah it's cleared out too much to have the crime it once did. Much like east st Louis but more populous. This is what much of Detroit looked like until the late 2000s and it is experiencing something of a revival now. Idk if it will work the same way in a place like Gary. As far as I can tell from living next door, the crime isn't much different from the crime we have in chicago, but on a smaller scale and with a much more sparse population.

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u/Phatergos Aug 20 '24

I mean East St Louis is very much still dangerous. It has a murder rate twice as high as the most dangerous city in the US, which is St Louis.

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u/Pixilatedhighmukamuk Aug 19 '24

Not just houses but schools, churches and other businesses. The architecture is beautiful but in scary/dangerous areas. I had pimp in a fur coat wanting to wash my windows.

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u/CornPop32 Aug 20 '24

Business must not be going very well

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u/ZeePirate Aug 19 '24

It’s the one you read about cops telling people not to stop at stop signs

So yes.

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u/labrador2020 Aug 19 '24

And didn’t UPS stop delivering there as well because of the crime in the city?

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u/bionicjoe Aug 19 '24

Wasn't Gary originally founded as a company town?
And then later used by unions as an example of the exploitation of workers when EVERYTHING is tied to your job. The coal mines were paying in scrip, but the company towns were almost worse.

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u/Proteinchugger Aug 19 '24

Coal mines were absolutely company towns. I grew up near some. All of the houses are the same because the company had one blueprint they used for all the homes. The mines owned the local newspapers and all the businesses back in the day.

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u/cortechthrowaway Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24

Gary was kind of a model community in 1906 (at least the nice part of town). The steel mill required way more workers than a coal mine--over 30,000 at its peak. A good number were management and engineers, and the company built a nice part of town for them.

It was also home to one of the nation's mosre progressive school systems. My grandmother was in Gary public schools in the 1910's, and she used to talk about what a great experience her elementary education had been, compared to how most schools were run at that time.

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u/JustMy10Bits Aug 20 '24

To be fair, 1910 was only 10 years after grade school became mandatory, and just 50 years after Horace Mann introduced the idea of grouping students in school by age.

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u/haikusbot Aug 19 '24

Gary used to be

A lot bigger when the steel

Mill was doing well

- drmobe


I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully. Learn more about me.

Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete"

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u/norrisdt Aug 19 '24

First verse of a Springsteen song right here.

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u/swentech Aug 19 '24

John Mellencamp did something similar in Minutes to Memories - “I worked my whole life in the steel mills near Gary, and my father before me I helped build this land. Now I’m 77 and with God as my witness I earned every dollar that passed through my hands.”

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u/The_Road_is_Calling Aug 19 '24

Days turn to minutes and minutes to memories,

Life sweeps away the dreams that we have planned,

You are young and you are the future,

So suck it up, and tough it out, and be the best you can.

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u/JohnYCanuckEsq Aug 19 '24

My favourite Mellencamp song by far.

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u/The_Road_is_Calling Aug 20 '24

It’s #2 for me, can’t put it above Rain on the Scarecrow.

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u/SirMellencamp Aug 20 '24

That whole album is so good

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u/moles-on-parade Aug 20 '24

My grandparents used to live in Merrillville, a dozen miles south of Gary, and I have vivid memories of listening to Mellencamp on the radio while falling asleep at their house when I was twelve or thirteen… reading those lyrics now is almost kinda spooky. Thank you for that.

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u/p13t3rm Aug 19 '24

This feels like a haiku by William Shatner

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u/EchoCyanide Aug 19 '24

Oh man, I had for read it in his voice and you're totally right.

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u/madarbrab Aug 19 '24

Unless deliberately composed for the form, they all tend to.

But if definitely does.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

Agreed - 2 generations ago Gary was much larger and was a going concern in the steel industry

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u/Dunkleostrich Aug 20 '24

This is the second mention of Gary in about a minute of scrolling for me. Strange days.

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u/Officialginger2595 Aug 19 '24

another important thing to note is that Chicago is built on the chicago river as well as the lake. A major river and a coastline are a lot more important to development than just a lake coastline.

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u/msn_rlj-12598 Aug 19 '24

Does Indianapolis have any major rivers that run through the city and the rest of the state?

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u/Imhappy_hopeurhappy2 Aug 19 '24

It’s on the white river, which has rapids and weirs across it so it is not navigable for trade. It was useful for manufacturing though.

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u/BIackSamBellamy Aug 20 '24

Also great for dumping bodies and kayaking.

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '24

All the necessities

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u/mrtrollmaster Aug 20 '24

They built Indianapolis on the White River, but the river was only a couple feet deep at spots. Indy is one of the larger cities not located on a major body of water.

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u/soundeng Aug 20 '24

Like Atlanta and the Chattahoochee.

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u/TheSloppyJanitor Aug 20 '24

Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee?

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u/Cheap-Bumblebee403 Aug 19 '24

I think I read somewhere that Indianapolis is the largest city in the US (North America maybe) without a navigable body of water. I keep waiting for this to come up at trivia night.

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u/bananabunnythesecond Aug 19 '24

I think it’s Dallas. Dallas exists because of rail lines today. Founded as a trading post between natives and settlers.

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u/runfayfun Aug 19 '24

As a Dallasite I can confirm it has no navigable bodies of water, nor any significant geographic features other than some low hills in the south and manmade lakes.

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u/Young_Lochinvar Aug 20 '24

What about the Trinity River?

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u/DonkeeJote Aug 20 '24

The Trinity River was historically navigable. Due to development along the flood plains, the Trinity is no longer navigable.

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u/HardingStUnresolved Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24

It waa never navigable to the sea, or anywhere of significance. The state invested a lot to put in a lock damn canal system, but ultimately failed to complete the project.

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u/HallOfPotatoes Aug 20 '24

There are a handful of locks that have partial remains still standing. Kinda neat to see

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u/93LEAFS Aug 20 '24

Vegas is another example. solely developed as a tourist location due to gambling laws there.

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u/No_Kale6667 Aug 19 '24

Doesn't Atlanta not have a navigable body of water?

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u/tanhan27 Aug 19 '24

You are correct. For a while there railways were equivalent to rivers in terms of where towns sprung up. What started as the terminus of the railway, became the railway hub to the south. Named "Atlantica-Pacifica", later shortened to Atlanta.

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u/Illustrious-Ruin-349 Aug 19 '24

No, the name started off as Terminus, then became Marthasville, and the was renamed Atlanta after the Western and Atlantic railroad.

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u/tanhan27 Aug 20 '24

Yeah but right before it changes to Atlanta it was Atlantica-Pacifica

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u/Bookr09 Aug 20 '24

googled it and wow, TIL atlanta was once named Atlantica-Pacifica.

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u/itsacutedragon Aug 20 '24

They should have stuck with Terminus

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u/chowderbrain3000 Aug 19 '24

That would be Phoenix.

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u/BobEvansBirthdayClub Aug 19 '24

I’ve traveled a good portion of the world, and I’m a farmer so I pay special attention to geography and natural resources along with the rest of the development of places and cities.

Nowhere else in the world has confused my instincts more than Phoenix. It really shouldn’t be there.

Granted, I have never been to Las Vegas. Both desert cities confuse the heck out of me.

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u/Stillinit1975 Aug 20 '24

Phoenix once made sense as a small farming community in a relatively fertile valley served by the Salt River. They dammed the salt in 1908 (along with basically every other flowing river in Arizona) to reroute water to either the Colorado or the Arizona Canal.

The monstrosity it's become though? That is nuts and in a hundred years will likely be drastically lower population than it is today.

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u/Donny-Moscow Aug 20 '24

That is nuts and in a hundred years will likely be drastically lower population than it is today.

I wonder how many major cities that’s true for

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u/Martha_Fockers Aug 20 '24

any place with a water shortage where they are watering there plants for green lawns in the desert wont exist as habitable places in about 50-100 years. not due to heat or anything but lack of fresh water to live in the desert anymore. its basicly at that point but theyll divert water from other places untill its to late and the feds finally say enough is enough no more new development in the desert no more houses in the desert and enforcing water restrictions that will kill there green fertile lawns in the desert that are watered multiple times a day.

a house in arizona is really cheap compared to most of the nation. my cousin moved there got a 350k home that was 5 bdrs full finished basem,ent 3 car garage 2400sq feet that same house in cali is like 1.5m in illinois like 800k for referance. moved back in a year because he hated the heat everyday lol.

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u/kmosiman Aug 19 '24

Indy is in the middle and was a planned city just like Washington D.C. One of the surveyors had been part of the DC planning crew.

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u/JohnYCanuckEsq Aug 19 '24

More importantly, the Chicago Portage linked the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River. It's less than six miles overland between the Chicago River and the Des Plaines River.

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u/four024490502 Aug 20 '24

Which is pretty cool to think about in my opinion. When I think of a Continental Divide, I think of some high elevation pass in the Rockies or Appalachia with steep terrain. Yet, there's one smack in the middle of Chicago.

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u/mechashiva1 Aug 19 '24

Chicago is also the largest US land based transportation hub thanks to Abraham Lincoln. During the reconstruction and rail expansion after the Civil War, he helped get a lot of railroad contracts in Illinois as a way of helping the state he used to represent. We have the most railroad hubs out of any state in the US.

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u/anally_ExpressUrself Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 20 '24

Wasn't it also reachable by water/canal from the east coast, and so (at the time) a cost-effective place to run a rail like that needs to connect to the ocean? Cheaper than dragging the rail line over the Appellations Appalachians, I mean.

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u/mrroney13 Aug 19 '24

I tried really hard to just raise my eyebrows and keep scrolling, but I just can't. I just don't have it in me, so...

Over the what now?

That is the most egregious, but somehow close enough to almost accept, attempt at "Appalachians" I've ever seen.

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u/1lard4all Aug 20 '24

Well, you have to call them something

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u/anally_ExpressUrself Aug 20 '24

I blame autocorrect.

But as a result of this, I learned that an appellation is a noun meaning "a name or title.".

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u/frozenhotchocolate Aug 19 '24

Yes! Chicago was the bridge between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. No other place had that.

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u/kberg218 Aug 20 '24

Not sure how helpful Lincoln would have been after the Civil War.

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u/nim_opet Aug 19 '24

Because Chicago was enough. Gary was an important manufacturing center and rather large for Midwest, but with depopulation and manufacturing being moved to Asia, it was reduced.

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u/msn_rlj-12598 Aug 19 '24

That makes sense. Chicago is certainly huge. Do you think Gary will ever have the kind of population it used to?

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u/nim_opet Aug 19 '24

I don’t see a scenario where that would be likely

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u/UtahUKBen Aug 19 '24

More than doubling the population doesn't seem feasible without some sort of massive infrastructure and employment change. In fact, the 2023 estimate shows a further 2% decline since the 2020 census.

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u/Capt_Foxch Aug 20 '24

The Great Lakes region will be a destination for climate refugees depending on how accurate climate change predictions are

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u/zedazeni Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 19 '24

Ehhhh maybe. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo are seeing their populations stabilize and even grow, so yes, it’s entirely probably that Rust Belt cities will rebound. The problem with Gary, in my opinion is:

1: it’s consumed by the Chicago metropolitan area, so if you want to move to that area, there’s plenty of more affordable places in Chicago that are prime for gentrification that are much closer to the city itself

2: If you want to move to Indiana for cheap housing, Indianapolis, Ft Wayne, and South Bend are more well-known. Not to mention college towns like Lafayette and Bloomington. Gary just isn’t what people think about when “Indiana” comes to mind.

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u/i_p_microplastics Aug 19 '24

Thanks to Freddie Gibbs, Gary is exactly what comes to mind when I think of Indiana

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u/Capt_Foxch Aug 20 '24

I moved to Cleveland about 3 years ago and have never looked back. Big city amenities without big city prices.

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u/Amtherion Aug 20 '24

And if you need to live in that region and don't want to live in Chicago, you've got Chesterton and Valparaiso right there that are both 10,000 times better than Gary. Both towns are decently priced and definitely on their way up.

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u/Outrageous-Leopard23 Aug 19 '24

All towns around the Great Lakes (especially ones that have experienced population decline-Detroit/Gary) are likely to be destinations for climate refugees in the coming decades.

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u/saginator5000 Aug 19 '24

Depends on who you ask. r/samegrassbutgreener is very optimistic about long-term growth in the Midwest/Rust Belt, but I personally don't see a path forward for old manufacturing towns like Gary in the near term. I think they will/are suffering the same fate as the Appalachian coal mining towns.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

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u/scole44 Aug 19 '24

If the first worldwide water shortage were to take place soon I imagine millions would flock towards the great lakes. It's a possibility certainly

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u/Moopey343 Aug 19 '24

Holy shit it lost like 30k population in just two decades. Damn

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u/zakuivcustom Aug 19 '24

At its peak Gary has around 178k people, not super big but not small either.

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u/sometimesimtoxic Aug 19 '24

And up until 2020, had Gary maintained that population, it would have still been the 2nd largest city in the Chicago media market, and just in that census, Aurora barely surpassed that number. And I use the term “media market” because there has always been ambiguity around what constitutes a Chicago suburb/Chicago metro vs exurbs (Joliet, Aurora, Elgin, Kenosha)

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u/saggywitchtits Aug 20 '24

Rockford is trying to claim their airport is the third Chicago airport. Like there's a perfectly good one in Gar... probably better to go to Rockford.

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u/agate_ Aug 19 '24

America’s cities are generally older than its state lines, and state lines don’t really control where cities get built. So the question is not so much “why doesn’t Indiana have a city on the south coast of Lake Michigan?” and more “why is there no city on the south coast of Lake Michigan?”

And the answer is that this coastline doesn’t have a river connecting it to anywhere useful inland, and is mostly covered in sand dunes that are hard to build on. So for almost everyone Chicago was the better option.

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u/msn_rlj-12598 Aug 19 '24

Great way to phrase it!

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u/I_likeYaks Aug 20 '24

I would also add the storms on that side of the shore are brutal.

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u/poopoopooyttgv Aug 20 '24

It’s super interesting to me that the state of Illinois only has Chicago in it (originally Wisconsin would extend to the southern tip of Lake Michigan and would include Chicago) because politicians at the time were worried about a future civil war. If Illinois didn’t have Chicago, its economy would be 100% reliant on selling goods down the Mississippi River and would realistically have allied with the south. With Chicago, Illinois economy would be split between selling goods down the Mississippi and across the lake, and probably wouldn’t ally with the south

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u/maringue Aug 20 '24

It's the geography, those sand dunes make it pretty impossible to build anything there.

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u/Iamatworkgoaway Aug 20 '24

There was a logging town, that logged all the trees, and that made the sand dunes swallow the town.

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u/norrisdt Aug 19 '24

I mean, the entire shoreline is either city or dunes already.

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u/msn_rlj-12598 Aug 19 '24

Didn’t know about the dunes! So perhaps it just wasn’t feasible to develop?

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u/Graychin877 Aug 19 '24

The Indiana and Michigan dunes on Lake Michigan's southeast shore are a national treasure.

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u/skittlebites101 Aug 20 '24

Sleeping bear, warren dunes, grand mere, grew up in SW Michigan and that's the one part I miss the most.

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u/eltedioso Aug 19 '24

The plan was duned to fail

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u/nkvsk2k Aug 19 '24

Luckily, environmentalists saved the dunes from development. It would be such a shame if the entire coast of Indiana’s share of the lake was city frontage.

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u/notanamateur Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 19 '24

People on r/nationalpark always whine about the Indiana dunes NP. If it weren’t a park, it’d just be more Gary.

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u/nkvsk2k Aug 19 '24

They do? How come?

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u/notanamateur Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 19 '24

Because it’s not “worthy” of being the same category as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon or something.

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u/nkvsk2k Aug 19 '24

Good. The less people that go there to me, the better. You hear that everyone? It’s an awful and ugly park, don’t ever go.

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u/iama_triceratops Aug 20 '24

They’d rather it stayed a National Lakeshore instead of being classified as a full on National Park. It was still part of the National Parks department, if I’m not mistaken, just classified and probably funded differently.

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u/nkvsk2k Aug 20 '24

Sounds like a buncha policy wads. Let them Whine

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u/cahawkfan Aug 19 '24

Indiana Dunes really is such a gem. So thankful it remained mostly preserved. My buddies and I dropped acid and spent an afternoon pretending to be dolphins in the lake in between stops on Grateful Dead tour in 1991. Good times!

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u/mintinthebox Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 29 '24

A significant part of it was designated as a National Shoreline in 1966. Within recent years the shoreline as well as a large amount of land nearby has become a National Park.

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u/Watchfull_Hosemaster Aug 20 '24

Indiana has some nice beaches, as strange as that is to say.

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u/Initial-Fishing4236 Aug 19 '24

Michigan City was in competition with Chicago early on.

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u/Imhappy_hopeurhappy2 Aug 19 '24

Then they got buried in six feet of snow in one storm and said “let’s try the other side”?

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u/Initial-Fishing4236 Aug 20 '24

Seriously

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u/greennitit Aug 20 '24

West coast of Michigan like the west coast to any state or Canadian province on the Great Lakes gets a million times more snow than middle or the east coast. It’s why the largest Michigan city on the west coast Grand Rapids is miles inland from the coast. Other examples include Erie PA, Buffalo NY

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u/Romanzo71 Aug 20 '24

And despite being roughly 30 miles inland they still get hammered by snow compared to the east side of the state. Years ago at an old job I used to deliver there once a week from Detroit and there could be no snow in Detroit and huge mounds piled up in the parking lots in GR. I also spent some time in Buffalo, NY in January for work at my current job working at the GM plant right on the water and that was a wild experience walking through that parking lot in white out blizzards, lake effect snow is no joke!

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u/less_than_nick Aug 20 '24

I didn’t know that, interesting. Spent a couple nights at that casino for a wedding there last year- the town seems like it has so much potential

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u/Virtual_Geologist_60 Aug 19 '24

I was trying to find Gary, because i heard it could blow up, but it turned up to be the Chicago’s suburb. As i guess, Chicago already transcends state borders and there is no need for big city

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u/grw313 Aug 19 '24

Is it unique? Michigan doesn't have a major city on lake Michigan either. That means 50% of the states that touch lake Michigan don't have a major city on lake Michigan. 50% isn't unique.

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u/msn_rlj-12598 Aug 19 '24

I suppose unique isn’t the best word! But still interesting nevertheless.

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u/Mr___Perfect Aug 19 '24

Worth noting Indiana's first capital WAS on the water.... on the other side of the state on the Ohio River.

They moved it to Indy as a purpose built capital because of it's central location and has been a hub for ground transportation for centuries as "the crossroads of America"

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u/msn_rlj-12598 Aug 19 '24

Their reasoning makes sense for moving the capital. But I find it interesting that Chicago is considered the biggest railroad hub and seen as the connector between the East and the west, not Indianapolis.

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u/yunkgang Aug 19 '24

Indy is also a very large event holding city. Many big conventions and other similar gatherings are the bread and butter that was setup in the late 70s to 80s

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u/redbirdrising Aug 19 '24

Yup, conventions are so core to their income, they built an elaborite skywalk allowing people to walk from the Lucas Oil Stadium, through the convention center, to all the major downtown hotels, and even the nearby mall. All indoors. Pretty handy when it's January and 10 degrees outside.

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u/Oceanbreeze871 Aug 19 '24

South bend, located on a river is the 4th largest city in the state at 350k metro area. It’s just not a very populated state. The big industry in South bend were failed car companies like studebaker and amc. Perhaps if they had been more successful, the city would have grown more.

The Chicago area has always had more industry snd jobs pulling in more people over the decades. Another city prob wasn’t needed

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

Because Chicago is right there. Chicago metro area has more people than the entire state of Indiana

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u/Grouchy_Air_4322 Aug 20 '24

Chicago metro area also includes a large chunk of Indiana

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u/63Boiler Aug 20 '24

Hey, the Assman's in town!

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u/Big-Carpenter7921 Aug 19 '24

It could be argued (technically incorrectly) that Chicago stretches into Indiana

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u/Master_Inspection413 Aug 19 '24

I am a region rat here, I always explain it to people when I travel like this: I am from Northwest Indiana, people from “real”Indiana say I am from Chicago, people from Chicago say I’m from Alabama. The region kind of has its own thing going.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

Also, the true Mason Dixon line is Rt 30.

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u/oscobosco Aug 20 '24

Everyone hates the region. Which makes us hardy. I usually just say I lived near Gary and it took me 30 minutes on a busy Sunday to get to downtown Chicago

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u/mr_sip Aug 20 '24

From Merrillville. When I went to college in the middle of the state everyone told me I wasn't really from Indiana I was from Chicago. When I got my first job in Chicago while still living at home for a semester/summer everyone asked me if I grew up on a farm and assumed it took me 2 hours to get to work even though my childhood home was closer to the office than their house in the Illinois suburbs. Nobody from either state wanted to claim the Region.

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u/Master_Inspection413 Aug 20 '24

Yeah, I don’t mind it though I think the region has its own charm. Its like a microcosm of the whole country condensed down into a couple county area. Theres farms, forests, dunes, urban expansion, urban decay, people from all over, industry, wealth, poverty. Some author should write something that takes place there. Maybe a historical-science fiction-allegorical-haiku-memoir or something.

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u/msn_rlj-12598 Aug 19 '24

Do you think people living in that NW corner of Indiana describe their town as the “suburbs of Chicago” or no?

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u/rwant101 Aug 19 '24

Lake and Porter counties in NWI are included in the Chicago metro region.

LaPorte county is included in the Chicago CSA which means it extends all the way to the Michigan border.

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u/nkvsk2k Aug 19 '24

That area of the state, “Northwest Indiana” or as the residents informally refer to it, “the Region”, is somewhat culturally distinct from the rest of Indiana due to its proximity to Chicago. It’s on central time, the rest of the state sans several counties around Evansville in the south (also on central time) is on eastern time. Also, the rest of the state has a reputation as just farmers and rednecks and white as the driven snow whereas NWI has a very diverse population and is mostly comprised of Chicago bedroom communities that are still very affordable mostly in their own right. In other words, all those small towns mashed together make the first or second biggest metropolitan area in the entire state to begin with, it’s just not one large distinct entity like Indianapolis.

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u/steezyparcheezi Aug 19 '24

Yes they’re technically a part of greater Chicagoland. Colloquially folks call it “the region.” Their claim to fame being that they’re “basically Chicago.”

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u/sometimesimtoxic Aug 19 '24

Many of the people living in NW Indiana treat it as a Schrödinger’s suburb. When Michael Jordan was winning titles, they were no doubt Chicagoans through and through. Some have migrated to Indiana over the years to stay in the area but keep arms length away from Illinois politics, regulations taxes, etc. while still being within a commutable distance. Honestly it depends who you ask.

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u/Chicago1871 Aug 19 '24

Its kinda like Chicago’s New Jersey.

Thats how Ive always seen it. The city is like an hour away or more from most places unless theyre living next to a south shore train station.

As someone born in raised in the thick of the city itself. It feels very different in lifestyle, but its not that different from many south suburbs either like Homewood-Flossmoor

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u/CrazyMedical9777 Aug 19 '24

The history that led to the current condition along Indianas lakeshore is very interesting, and is a deep rabbit hole, but what is happening to attempt to repair that condition is also super interesting. Look into the Indiana regional development authority. There has been a lot of planning work leading to double tracking the south shore line. Each station area along the commuter rail received its own TOD planning effort and established a Transit Development District (https://www.nwitdd.com) as an economic tool to incentivize development along the rail corridor. Hopefully this will start to ignite some positive change in this historically disinvested rust belt geography.

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u/AnonymousMeeblet Aug 20 '24

Gary, Indiana used to be a major steel city, and then the jobs got outsourced and now the only thing to do there is see how fast you can go getting out of Gary, Indiana

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '24

Gary. It is a shithole, but was once thriving.

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u/Overall-Tailor8949 Aug 19 '24

Chicago sucked all the energy out of Gary. Except for steel production.

The same could be said for Michigan, Muskegon really isn't all that large a city, especially since the paper mills shut down. Although I will freely admit I do NOT miss that stench.

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u/Gjiofnwek Aug 19 '24

I haven't seen it mentioned but the shores of the South and Southeast of Lake Michigan get absolutely housed with lake effect snow every Winter. Like 2 feet of snow at a time when the Southwest side of Lake Michigan (aka Chicago) gets only an inch or two

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u/Ordinary_Cat- Aug 20 '24

So Gary is a joke to you?

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u/dirtywater29 Aug 20 '24

Gary, Indiana music intensifies

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u/frejling Aug 19 '24

All of lakeshore IN is part of Chicagoland

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u/DoctorPhalanx73 Aug 20 '24

The Indiana dunes national park is a good use of that space anyway.

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u/lonestarninja47 Aug 20 '24

Gary Indiana Gary Indiana

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u/NHBikerHiker Aug 20 '24

Does Indiana even have a major city?? 🤣🤣🤣🤣

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u/uyakotter Aug 19 '24

Stalin used Gary as the model for Soviet factory cities. Gary’s US Steel mill was the world’s largest. The Indiana lakeshore is downwind of the mill, thousands of trains per day, and factories on Chicago’s south side.

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u/Bendyb3n Aug 19 '24 edited Aug 20 '24

I'm not from the midwest so I could be entirely wrong, but another possible reason that no major city developed on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan is due to lake effect snow. On all the Great Lakes, the lake effect snow travels west to east, meaning the eastern coast of all the lakes get absolutely PUMMELED with tens of feet of snow every winter. While perhaps not overly effecting development, it certainly might effect people's desire to live there. With Chicago being situated where it is, it gets significantly less snow than even a mere 40miles east along the coast

Buffalo (or maybe Cleveland? can't say I know too much about Cleveland winters) would probably be the largest city on an east coast of a Great Lake. Buffalo is notorious for it's horrid winters each year and gets some of the most snow of any inhabited area in the entire country, even when compared to Alaska

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u/TinjaniRa Aug 19 '24

Cos stone cold said so

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u/nicspace101 Aug 20 '24

Cuz little cities can't wait to move out of Indiana when they grow up.

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u/B1GFanOSU Aug 20 '24

You made Gary cry.

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u/pandapurplez Aug 20 '24

Big cities were built on rivers! Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St, Louis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, etc., each built around a navigable river. Few exceptions.

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u/REAL_YoinkySploinky Aug 20 '24

What are you talking about, Gary is RIGHT THERE

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u/UmpireDear5415 Aug 20 '24

because chicago exists

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u/AFforAU Aug 20 '24

Clearly you’re forgetting the metropolis of Gary

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u/LeadershipExternal58 Aug 20 '24

On the map you can see the name of the old industrial City of Gary

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u/WheezerMF Aug 20 '24

The coastline east of Gary (all the way up the Michigan side) is sand, and is not suitable for building. Harbors have to be dredged, and the shoreline is elevated from the water. Also, at that point any city would be competing with Chicago Detroit Cleveland and Indianapolis, so it’s hard to get a critical mass there. Chicago has better terrain, and the rail and water access is easier,

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u/BussySlayer142 Aug 20 '24

Hey… Gary is right there :(

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u/pahles Aug 19 '24

The Indiana Territory's northern border in 1805 was at the southern point of Lake Michigan. This effectively gave Indiana no coastline to Lake Michigan. The border was moved 10 miles north when it became a state in 1816 to give Indiana at least some access to Lake Michigan.

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u/vpkumswalla Aug 19 '24

I am surprised too there isn't more commercial development along the lake shore - resorts, lake front vacation homes, etc. It seems it's 1/3 industrial, 1/3 parks and 1/3 residential

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u/Initial-Fishing4236 Aug 19 '24

Gary and steel mills further east kinda ruined that.

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u/Santeno Aug 19 '24

It's basically the same reason New Jersey doesn't have a large city near New York City. Newark has tried but it continues to decay because its just too close to NYC. People and businesses generally want to be in Chicago if they have the option, rather than be in another state with different laws and lacking in the financial, cultural and entertainment opportunities of Chicago

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u/CuckoldMeTimbers Aug 19 '24

One reason I’m not seeing in the comments is the lake effect - the east coast of the Great Lakes gets MUCH worse snow storms.

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u/KLGodzilla Aug 20 '24

Gary had nearly 180k people at one time while Hammond had over 100k before industrial decline of the 1970s-80s so it used to have two decent sized cities

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u/gswilk Aug 20 '24

The Indiana Dunes National Park is right beside Gary. The plant diversity there is nuts due to its geographical position at the base of Lake Michigan. The beaches are gorgeous. The place backs right up to abandoned industrial works.

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u/cmacfarland64 Aug 20 '24

Gary Indiana is that city.

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u/millerheizen5 Aug 20 '24

I forgot Indiana existed just like they forgot to build a lake city.

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '24

They did, it was called Gary