Foster Bell estimates he’s lived across from Horace S. Norton Elementary School for close to 40 years. Often, the 80-year-old would sit outside watching the trees that obscured the school where all eight of his children went. The tree he enjoyed looking at the most had beautiful flowers, with leaves that hung down like string beans.
Now, there’s barely a stump marking where it stood.
“In our neighborhood, they tear down,” he said. “They don’t build too much, but they tear down.”
Crews began preparing to demolish the vacant school last month, almost two decades after the Gary Community Schools Corporation closed it. The move has been bittersweet for neighbors and former students, who lovingly remember the former school’s history but look forward to the opportunities its razing could hold for the future.
Norton’s location on Harrison Boulevard falls near the 11th Avenue corridor, an area that’s being poised for revitalization, according to Gary’s redevelopment director, Christopher Harris.
By clearing away the school, a pathway is created for that land to be utilized in other ways. This is something that Harris is expecting to occur as “development gains its synergy and momentum along the Broadway corridor and along the greater downtown area.”
And the school’s demolition isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. This year, blight removal took place in the Aetna neighborhood, plans to redesign the historic Palace Theatre are in the works, and a collaboration between the city and the University of Notre Dame’s architecture school was recently announced. That partnership will see the creation of a downtown revitalization plan that developers can follow.
While the city doesn’t own Norton, both city leaders and GCSC officials were aligned on the school’s need to be torn down. An expected end date for the demolition was not shared by GCSC. Capital B Gary was also told by a district representative that there are no current plans for the lot where Norton sits. No comment was given on whether the district plans to sell the land.
At a July 24 redevelopment commission meeting, Harris called the present an exciting time for the city.
“I think that any major blighted structure that’s removed is a weight and a burden off of the surrounding community,” he said during an interview with Capital B Gary, though he acknowledged the sentimental value of closed schools can make demolition more emotional.
“It’s also heartbreaking, but … in an effort for us to be able to move forward and recalibrate our city, some of these decisions [are] going to be made.”
Norton’s origins
Gary was a rapidly growing but heavily segregated town in the first half of the 20th century. One of its few pockets of integration was at the K-12 Froebel School, which was heralded for its progressiveness although the Black students, who made up nearly half of its population by the 1940s, weren’t treated equitably.
As more Black residents moved to the area around Froebel, the school began to suffer from severe overcrowding, underfunding, and neglect, according to a parent’s account in the Indiana Magazine of History.
Frustrated with Froebel’s conditions, members of its parent teacher association — aided by nearby PTAs — campaigned to establish an elementary school at Norton Park during the late 1950s.
The park at the time represented a boundary separating a predominantly Black neighborhood from a largely white one. When brought to school district leaders, parents were met with resistance and told it’d be “unthinkable” to build there for a host of reasons, including the existence of a small school for children with physical disabilities.
But, the parents didn’t give up. They proposed those students also attend the new school they were fighting for, and asked that ramps and therapeutic pools be provided.
Within that mix of parents was Kay Spencer’s mother. The 76-year-old Gary resident lives near Norton and remembered collecting signatures to garner support for building Norton as a young Girl Scout. Petitions, like the one Spencer took around, proved that there was widespread approval from Black and white residents alike.
By the 1960s, the school was built and Spencer said half of it was designated for children with disabilities, which one of her younger sisters benefited from.
“Norton was an exceptionally good school,” she said on a recent afternoon. In the background, one could see the school she and her mother played a part in getting made.
Soon she will see it come down, too.
Next steps
Spencer and other residents interviewed by Capital B Gary are uncertain about what will become of the land once Norton is gone, but all agreed they were glad to no longer have to witness its deterioration.
From 1967 to 1971, Jeanetta White attended an elementary school that was “full of love,” where kids were nurtured by caring adults. Today’s building, with its broken windows and tagged walls, doesn’t bring to mind the place with summer recreation offerings and pizza days.
“That’s not the Norton I know,” she said.
Since its closure in 2006, the school has been the site of vandalism and fires. And tragedy struck when a woman’s body was found in 2019. Calls to deal with the vacant property increased after the discovery. The following year, former Gary Mayor Jerome Prince ordered GCSC to demolish it.
During a press conference in January 2020, Prince accused the district of violating the city’s unsafe buildings code and warned of citations, but no demolition plans were brought forth to the public.
Two years later, when the district launched a survey for the community to select which closed school they’d most like to see torn down, Norton emerged as the top pick for 92% of respondents.
The demolition was expected to begin in the spring of 2023. This never took place. Paige McNulty, the then-leader of GCSC, said the district had enough money set aside to do so, but the prospect of tearing down the school wasn’t publicly discussed again until this year.
After Gary Mayor Eddie Melton took office in January, he began conversations with the district about sites that were key for his redevelopment plans, Harris said. Norton’s demolition is partly being funded by $586,000 Melton gave the district for money the city hadn’t paid as part of a tax agreement over the past decade.
While the razing hasn’t been completed yet, residents have already started throwing out ideas about what could replace the school. Most of them are related to housing, something that’s increasingly become less accessible in the city.
Some have suggested single-family houses, and others have proposed senior apartments or condos.
Whatever takes the school’s place, one thing is clear: It will certainly have a legacy to live up to.
“Everybody that lived in the community, who grew up in the community, [Norton] was just a big part of all of our lives,” White said.