Posts Tagged ‘Gary Indiana’
Michael Jackson’s hometown just made Indiana a swing state October 6th, 2008
The last time Indiana voted for a democratic president was in 1964. But over the last week it just became a ‘battleground’ state. Losing ground rapidly, the McCain campaign did something republicans have rarely done in the past: they began an advertisement surge. They would have been thinking of Gary when they did this. Or what’s left of it apart from 100,000 people.
Every shop on the West side of Broadway is shut. Has been shut for the last quarter of a century. At the Palace theatre, it says the Jackson Five is playing tonight, but that is a lie. The Jackson Five lived here (Michael was the youngest of them), but they beat it a long time ago.
Nobody can play at the Palace theatre. It exists only as a fabrication. They put up the display about Gary’s most famous sons about eight years ago. It was part of Gary’s effort to appear prettier–now we know where the roots of roots Michael Jackson’s cosmetic aspirations lie–because it came into some money.
The ‘loosest slots in the mid-west’, that float on riverboat casinos on lake Michigan (the gambling business, gives the state close to $ 50 million a year) had made it possible for Gary to spend on this bizarre face-painting. If you are fond of the theatre of the absurd, then Broadway, Gary, is where you want to be.
On boarded up windows, there is artwork by people who were no doubt the dregs of the poster-painting business: men and women looking onto the street with curious perspective. Frozen people walk into theatres–there are even painted salesmen in stores that will never be.
Who were they trying to fool?
And now, even that coat of paint is peeling, the coloured people in them ageing poorly.
Did I say every shop was closed? Apologies. Payday loans is open. Doing great business: get advances for a small price; about a dollar on the hundred that you may not earn. There’s a queue at this place. Cars lined up outside. As Wall Street says ‘May Day’, Gary says Payday.
You get angry when you get to Gary. But a town so bereft of soul, robbed of its last 21 grams, is difficult to find. That, and the theatre of the absurd, makes the trip worth it–even if you are not running for president.
In this election, Gary is the one town, say analysts (in a reasoned manner) and Mayor Rudy Clay, (as if it were gospel) that will swing Indiana the black man’s way.
Mayor Rudy Clay, Gary, Indiana
At 85%, Gary has the highest percentage of African Americans in cities that have 100,000 or more people.
“When all the votes are counted up and iss aaalll even, and then you add Gary, where Obama gets 95% (this is a fair estimate) that’s when you win the state”, says Mr Clay from his rather nice office in City Hall a few buildings down from all the boarded establishments, and just across the street from a perforated ghost: the old Sheraton, the hotel that stayed on because it was too big to move.
Gary kept everyone waiting on primary night a few months ago. It was the last town to report its results (by several hours) and there was some suggestion of rigging. But eventually, Obama lost Indiana to Hilary Clinton despite Gary’s overwhelming support.
The mayor’s explanation is that it took his town that long because 11,000 early voters had cast their votes and these had to the counted ‘the ol’ fashioned way, by hand’, according to Clay.
The same thing is about to happen in November. ‘But we’ll get more hands’, says Clay.
He likes to dress, does Mr Clay. His cuffs have his name embroidered and there’s an adventurous (but smart) tie. He’s been on the job two years now and he’s worked out quite an elegant formulation for Gary’s plight: “Let’s just say, that Gary’s best times are still to come.”
Hallelujah.
Tags: Barack Obama, Depression, Economy, Gary Indiana, Indiana, John McCain, Mayor Rudy Clay, Michael Jackson, Politics, Recession, The Jackson Five, US Elections 2008
Posted in Article | Comments (1)
Can Gary once again play the agent of change? October 6th, 2008
GARY, Indiana, with its farcical Broadway and Fifth Avenue—streets that couldn’t even pass for a cheap film set—is no ordinary town. It’s got a motto that says: ‘We are doing great things’. Among the great things it wants to do, is play a crucial role in winning Indiana—which has not voted for a Democrat for president since 1964—for Barack Obama.
Among great things it has accomplished, says a City Hall poster, is the recent opening of Dustie’s Buffet, an eat-all-you-want place. I am not making this up.
No, Gary isn’t ordinary, because it was the first major town in the United States to elect a black mayor, Richard Hatcher, in 1967. That said something about the town. What happened immediately after, made a much broader point: it said something about America.
White people fled Gary after that election, hitting the gas even harder after the country’s first National Black Political Convention was held there in 1972. They took all their money and all their business and went down to Merrillville, 22 miles south, to entrench themselves in a town that once belonged to the peace-loving Potawatomi Indians. (Merrillville’s approximate demographics: 70% white; 22% black, 0.33% American Indian).
Gary, once a market where shampoos and lotions were tested by the likes of Levers before being sold in the big cities, turned into a place where detergents were hard to find. This happened quite rapidly. After years of steady growth in population, helped by the then competitive steel mills in the area that offered decent blue-collar employment at the very least, the South (and South of) Chicago steel mills that Barack Obama recalls from his childhood started shutting down in the 1960s.
Broadway, a 1923 picture hanging in city hall tells you, was a bustling street: Dr Eurit the dentist was clearly extracting some business; the theatre poster did not lie when it said Dorothy Philips stars in the Slander and the Woman tonight.
Most of all, there were people. The closure of the steel mills and the politics that led to the white flight of the 60s, changed both the demographics and the economics of Gary. By the time Michael Jackson was recording Thriller, Gary had one of the highest crime rates in the country (it still makes the top 20 most dangerous places in America, down a bit, though there were 71 homicides in 2007).
Dr Guy Spencer, businessman/ actor/model/composer/radio host (his
cards say all of this; in Gary, you can do a lot of things, or nothing) went to the National Black Political Convention with his dad in 1972. It was held across the street from where he runs his printing business today, and he has a briefcase from it as a keepsake. It was important, of course, that summit. But it did very little to cure what Spencer calls the black people’s “crabs in the bucket disease”. This is in the same vein as Obama’s ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’. Except that it means ‘if one of us tries to escape, “we will pull us down”.’
That disease, combined with one more diagnosed (post facto) by Dr Spencer, made Gary elect a white mayor once again. The other illness was “the great white hope syndrome”. During the three terms he was mayor (till 2006), Scott King, oversaw the failed facelift of Broadway, and couldn’t satisfactorily account for $700 million the city got off casinos, contractors and the like, according to Dr Spencer.
Every Gary vote will be invaluable to America’s much loved agent of change. But those who cast them see change in a different light. It won’t be just about the empowerment of black people (i.e. getting them elected to official positions as it was when Hatcher was elected.) Gary’s been there, done that.
Tags: Barack Obama, Gary Indiana, US Elections
Posted in Article | Comments (0)