This contribution focuses on Gary, Indiana, a once-thriving centre of manufacturing that became a symbol of the decline of the steel industry in the United States [Place]. The presentation is organized into three sections that mark the journey Gary made [Time], from an industrial town [Past] to a post-industrial town [Present], and from deindustrialization to post-deindustrialization [Future]. The discussion of this journey is anchored around three central notions: the (public) school, community, and race, the latter to be considered a “continual sticking point” between the first two, with both a spatial and a socio-cultural dimension (Cohen 1990, 156). The first section discusses Gary´s heyday, from its origins in 1906 until the 1940s. During that period Gary was hailed as a New Industrial Utopia and America’s Magic City of Steel (O’Hara 2011). Gary was a lively city of mostly Eastern and Southern European working-class immigrants, and its public school system, known as the Gary Plan or work-study-play-plan or platoon system, is considered to be one of the most telling examples of progressive education in the United States (Kliebard 2004; Semel and Sadovnik 1999; Zilversmit 1993; Cohen 1990; Cremin 1961). The second section discusses a series of dramatic events taking place between 1940 and the 1960s. The influx of African Americans from the South had resulted in a segregated cityscape that by 1940 was marked by a black ghetto (Betten and Mohl 1974; see also Stoler 2008). The Gary Plan that had begun to unravel in the 1930s was dismantled in the 1940s and finally died in 1960 (Cohen 1990). The election in 1967 of the city’s first black mayor, Richard Gordon Hatcher, led to a white flight, which was the moment that Gary became a black city (O’Hara 2011). Until today Gary is plagued by joblessness, concentrated poverty, and racial isolation. The third section takes Gary’s economic and demographic decline that since the 1960s had resulted in physical decay as a starting point to revisit John Dewey’s works (particularly Dewey and Dewey, 1962/1915, in which the Gary Plan is discussed) and aims at exploring both the possibilities and limitations of what a renewed interest into the (public) school as a “social clearinghouse” could offer to urban redevelopment, particularly in Gary (Dewey and Dewey 1962/1915, 197). What is argued for is “social imagineers” instead of social engineers (Giroux 1999). This quest makes it worth to connect past, present, and future.

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