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Cities: Gary Gary Gary Indiana (Population 102,746, 2000 Census) is one of the newest and largest cities in the State. Gary lies in northern Lake County, on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was created in 1906 by US Steel, which named the town after the chairman of the company's board of directors, and proceeded to construct the largest steel mill in the world on the adjacent shores of Lake Michigan. Gary's fortunes have been strongly linked to those of the steel industry, and a period of expansion in the earlier decades of the 20th century was followed by a near-total collapse during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Second World War and prosperity of the 1950s saw a revival in the area's prospects, but by the 1960s a combination of several factors, including labor unrest, energy prices and increasing foreign competition, began curtailing steel production in the area. Poverty, racial tension, blight and a growing sense of the cost of environmental pollution have all contributed to a dramatic decrease in the city's population. Despite some impressive attempts at revitalization, much of Gary today has a forlorn, even devastated, aspect complete with gutted buildings and entire city blocks razed and left as vacant lots. Gary has been the birthplace of several people who've gone on to successful careers, including the astronaut Frank Borman, entertainers Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson, football great Alex Karras, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson, actor Karl Malden, and the tenor James Eugene McCracken. City of Gary Website