A Massive Abandoned Gary Church With Several Small Churches Inside One Building

This is a Presbyterian church in Gary, Indiana, and it is very decayed. The building holds several small churches inside the one big church, along with a basement full of mold and water damage.

The mold is the first thing to know. We were in it most of the video, and I’ll say now that we should have been wearing masks.

What we found

We started in the basement. A couch, headphones, a lawnmower, a grill, a dresser with old wallpaper behind it, and a pool table sitting in front of a chalkboard. The ceiling tiles were coming apart under our feet and a few doors had come off their frames. One room was a stage.

Water was running down there, and we agreed the power still seemed to be on. A vending machine had been cracked open and emptied, which is typical. I wondered out loud how the building still had power and water at all. One set of stairs turned out to have no power on it, and I was glad about that.

We were supposed to be wearing masks, and we weren’t. We usually don’t find places this moldy, and it was bad enough that I said it would put you in the hospital if you stayed too long. The stairs were the next problem. One set was framed out with drywall so people couldn’t come up, and then people destroyed it. The floor past it was bad.

Upstairs it opens up. One small chapel first, with gorgeous colors, and then the main sanctuary, with stained glass at the far end and the upper deck collapsed. Another room held band equipment and a guitar, and there was a third little church past that. In the main sanctuary the pews were rotting. Normally the pews are the best preserved thing in an abandoned church, and these had rotted.

The rooms were full of strange things. A stack of baby pads, unopened, which I still can’t explain. A record player. A saw that someone had probably used to get in. Frost on the ceiling that looked like glitter. Two pianos, and a generator somebody had left inside.

The smell was worse in the upper rooms than in the basement. A sign on one door said please knock before entering. The floor behind it was unsafe, which I did not expect from a floor that high up.

In a staircase we found a bathtub, wire strippers, a whole bedroom’s worth of stuff and an ax box. Elsewhere were a mission yearbook and a prayer book, cassette tapes, DVDs, football cards, a PlayStation 2 remote, an old microwave and school computers. A room still had a teacher’s name on it, and another said nursery. It had been a daycare. I climbed a staircase with several steps missing to get one last look at the upper level.

Back in the basement there was one more small church we had missed. The seats had collapsed, the Bibles were ruined, and an offering table and a podium were still there. Past it was an office with old vacuum cleaners and a closet with a sewing machine and a stack of records.

Why Gary has so many empty buildings

I can’t give you the history of this particular church from sources I trust. What I can show is the city around it.

Gary grew to about 178,000 residents by 1960. PBS NewsHour reported in September 2024 that the city has lost more than half its population since the 1960s, tied to fewer steel jobs and white flight, and that some 10,000 buildings across the city are abandoned. A University of Chicago Magazine piece reported that U.S. Steel’s Gary Works once employed more than 20,000 people and was down to around 5,000, and that officials estimated as many as 15,000 homes, about a quarter of the city’s housing, stood empty.

That’s my read, and not something the sources say about this church. Churches follow their congregations. When a neighborhood loses that many people, a building with a main sanctuary, several chapels, a basement hall and a daycare is hard to fill and expensive to keep up. PBS points to another Gary church, City Methodist, as an example, a roofless 1926 building that closed in 1975.

Here, the power was apparently still on and the water was running.