Previous threads:
I II III Continuing this series, next up are some of the schools in Gary. For those of you following the Great Lakes urbex scene, you might have heard that Gary has a lot of abandoned schools. You also might have heard that those schools have gotten significantly harder and riskier to explore in recent years, with multiple people receiving felony charges after triggering alarms in certain buildings. Both of these are true.
Even so, security was not upped evenly between all the schools- some remained easily accessed while others had alarms, cameras, and response times of under a minute. The real trick was figuring out which schools were which.
Just a heads up, this is going to be a pretty photo-heavy thread.
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That brings us to our first school, Lew Wallace High School. Once regarded as one of the cooler and more intact abandoned schools of Gary, the school was built in 1926 and closed in 2015. It remained somewhat easily accessible for several years like all the abandoned schools of Gary during this time period.
That all changed in 2020. A group of teenagers posted a video to Youtube showing themselves breaking into Lew Wallace High School and "lighting fireworks, vandalizing the building, using a stun gun on each other, defecating on floors, running around the gym naked and lighting a fire on the roof and diving into it." City officials were outraged. The teens were arrested and the mayor of Gary ordered city police to crack down heavily on trespassing at all abandoned schools across the city, believing that this incident reflected poorly on his administration.
This Youtube video (which has since been deleted) is directly responsible for both the rapid increase in difficulty and severity of charges faced by urban explorers in Gary while exploring schools from 2020 onward. The mayor also used this incident to push for the demolition of Lew Wallace, which was completed in late 2021.
Myself and several other explorers gained access in 2021 after demolition had already begun. While the front portion of the school was in ruins, 90-95% of the school was still intact and wrecking crews had made access easy. Demolition was completed several months later.
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Next up is a library. It's not really a school, but a library is close enough that I'm lumping it in with the other two schools for this thread. The library itself was a small branch library built in 1918 by the Carnegie estate, one of many across the country. It shut down in 1963 and has become heavily dilapidated over the years, so much so that the floor is no longer stable. This heavily limited the places I could stand and take photos from, but I made do.
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This last one is one of the more well known abandoned schools of Gary. Like Lew Wallace, it opened in 1926 with a near-identical architectural style. Unlike Lew Wallace, this one closed about a decade earlier and has sat empty for nearly twenty years now. The decay and vandalism over the years was so extensive that the city didn't even really bother to try and lock this place down while they were securing most of the other schools in Gary back during the pandemic.
Despite the heavy traffic this abandoned school receives, it does have one secret most explorers don't find- a fallout shelter in the basement, complete with old supply barrels from the Department of Civil Defense. It's so hidden that, even having seen it before, it took me an hour to find it again on a subsequent visit. The gymnasium also appears to be a combination of underground art space and party spot.
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These days it sounds like security is finally easing up on most of the schools in Gary, though a few are still notoriously difficult. Perhaps one day I'll go back to see a few more. But until then, enjoy these pics from the archives.
