Joseph S. Pete

Gary was a burgeoning company town filled with tarpaper shanties, makeshift shacks and other plumbingless homes that were quickly slapped up for workers shortly after U.S. Steel's colossal Gary Works steel mill rose out of the sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan.

The limestone facade of the towering Gothic Revival City Methodist Church, one of Northwest Indiana's most prominent architectural landmarks, was meant to convey a sense of stature and permanence in a hastily developed mill town where an influx of itinerant and immigrant workers transformed what had been marshland and woods. Built in 1925, the church at 577 Washington St. was meant to bring religion to a rough-and-tumble town where steelworkers flocked to more than 200 saloons when not toiling before the v

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