Steelworkers and Neighbors Unveil Portrait Exhibit as Decisions Loom Over Northwest Indiana’s Steel Mills
“Our Mill, Our Home” features 20 stories of what steel has given the region, what it has cost, and what residents want next
GARY, Ind. — More than 120 residents, steelworkers, and families gathered Saturday at Gateway Park East, across from Gary City Hall, for the grand opening of Our Mill, Our Home: Gary's Past, Present & Future. The outdoor exhibit features portraits and first-person stories from 20 steelworkers, fenceline residents, activists, faith leaders, and longtime residents across Northwest Indiana.
“These portraits show how tangled together steel and our region’s story really are. Workers and neighbors aren’t on opposite sides. They’re the same families, and they deserve a real say in what comes next,” said Lisa Vallee of Just Transition Northwest Indiana, the event’s emcee and a lead organizer. “The technology to make cleaner steel already exists, and the investment belongs here in Northwest Indiana, with the workers who built this industry.”
The afternoon opened with a guided tour of the exhibit, followed by a program featuring Gary Mayor Eddie Melton, First District Councilwoman Lori Latham, and several of the exhibit’s storytellers. Gary resident Beverly Lewis, who lives near the mill where her father worked, opened the program with a poem. Between speakers, families made buttons, enjoyed festive foods, and walked the gallery.
For more than a century, steel has shaped Northwest Indiana. Union jobs in the mills bought homes, put kids through school, and gave generations of families a path to the middle class. For storyteller Harold Robinson, a third-generation steelworker, steel meant “a roof over our head, money in our pocket, food in our stomach… it meant life for us.”
The exhibit comes as major decisions shape the future of Northwest Indiana’s three integrated steel mills, which produce roughly one out of every five tons of steel made in the United States. But their coal-based blast furnaces also contribute significantly to air, water, and soil contamination in the region. According to a recent Indiana University report, air pollution from the mills contributes to about $100 million in healthcare costs each year, along with hundreds of respiratory emergency room visits and tens of thousands of lost work and school days.
For storyteller Frieda Graves, who has run a farm in the shadow of Gary’s steel plants for ten years, those numbers are personal. “I have concerns because I have asthma. My daughter has asthma. A lot of our children have asthma,” she said.
Nippon Steel, which now owns U.S. Steel, has promised to spend $3.1 billion at Gary Works by 2028. So far, its biggest project there is a $350 million reline that will keep a 50-year-old coal-burning blast furnace running through the 2040s. Earlier this week, Cleveland-Cliffs delayed the reline of Blast Furnace C at its Burns Harbor mill for the third time.
Meanwhile, steelmakers are investing billions in cleaner, more modern Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) technology elsewhere, including Nippon Steel’s own $1.9 billion DRI facility in Arkansas and Hyundai Steel’s $5.8 billion mill in Louisiana. No such investments are currently planned for Northwest Indiana, where direct steel employment could fall from roughly 9,000 jobs today to fewer than 5,000 by 2034 without modernization, according to the Indiana University report.
Dorreen Carey, a storyteller who joined U.S. Steel in 1976 under a consent decree that opened the trades to women, saw both the mill’s opportunity and its danger before the 1983 layoffs pushed her out. Now volunteer board president of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, one of the exhibit’s presenting organizations, she calls on Nippon Steel to “invest in the future of Gary, invest in Gary Works. Modernize. Continue to do the cleanup, and be a better neighbor to the city.”
Our Mill, Our Home is an outdoor installation at Gateway Park East (11 E 4th Ave), across from Gary City Hall and steps from Gary Works. Tyrell Anderson, a third-generation U.S. Steel worker and founder of Decay Devils, photographed most of the portraits, and Just Transition Northwest Indiana conducted the interviews. Decay Devils, Just Transition Northwest Indiana, Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, Indiana Conservation Voters, Faith in Place, Mighty Earth, and Industrious Labs present the exhibit.
All 20 stories are available at ourmillourhome.com.
###
About Industrious Labs: Industrious Labs is dedicated to transforming heavy industry to drive solutions that cut pollution, create good jobs, and build healthier, more equitable communities. Learn more at www.industriouslabs.org.