The New Music District on Broadway Doesn't Include the Mural Everyone Photographs

Walk south on Broadway from the 500 block and you pass Genesis Towers first, the 1926 building that opened as Hotel Gary and now houses senior apartments. A few blocks further, near 8th Avenue, is the old Sears building where Felix "Flex" Maldonado painted a four-story Jackson 5 mural, a revival of an earlier piece he did a few blocks north at 561 Broadway. These are the two Jackson 5 murals people actually stop their cars for. They are also both outside the boundary of the district Indiana just approved.

In March, the City of Gary Redevelopment Commission confirmed that the state's Office of Community and Rural Affairs had designated a stretch of Midtown as an official Indiana Main Street, officially named the Midtown Broadway Cultural Heritage and Music District. The boundary, as the city describes it, runs roughly from Broadway to Harrison Street and from 21st Avenue to 27th Avenue. That is a specific six-block band of Broadway, not the whole corridor, and not the section where the famous murals sit.

What the State Actually Signed Off On

The designation makes Gary home to the only officially recognized Indiana Main Street in Lake and Porter Counties, and the state has called it Indiana's first Cultural Main Street built specifically to honor a Historically Black neighborhood. Mayor Eddie Melton framed it as a starting point rather than a finished project, saying Gary has a cultural legacy that was resilient enough to persist despite many historical challenges, and calling the designation a foundational step toward what he described as a premier Musical District built around what he called Gary's Statehouse "Two-Five" corridor.

The district will be run day to day by a newly formed nonprofit, Gary Broadway Main Streets Inc., led by local planner Parisrice Robinson, who has previously helped stand up Main Street programs in Florida. At the March 11 Redevelopment Commission meeting, Robinson called it the first Main Street in Lake County and in the city of Gary, and said the designation gives Midtown shop owners a shared brand, marketing support, and technical training rather than just a name on a sign.

Where 21st Avenue Actually Falls

Broadway addresses in Gary track avenue numbers closely enough to use as a rough map. Genesis Towers sits at 578 Broadway, a two-minute walk north of 6th Avenue. That same math puts the Vee-Jay Records mural, painted by Tyrue "Slang" Jones at 2438 Broadway, right around 24th Avenue, and the Denise Williams mural at 2490 Broadway close to 25th. Both fall comfortably inside the new district's 21st-to-27th-Avenue band.

The two Jackson 5 pieces don't. The Sears building mural at 839 Broadway sits closer to 8th Avenue, and the original 561 Broadway piece is closer to 6th. Both are more than a dozen blocks north of where the Music District actually starts. If you're picturing the mural everyone photographs when you hear "Gary music history," you're picturing a building that sits in downtown Gary proper, not in the corridor the state just named after that history.

That gap matters less as a correction and more as a map. Downtown Gary, the stretch anchored by City Hall, the Lake County Courthouse, and Genesis Towers, has its own separate revitalization track, backed by a $15 million READI 2.0 grant the city secured for blight removal and a "Going Vertical" downtown building push. Midtown Broadway is a different six blocks with a different designation and, for now, a different funding source. Someone walking south from downtown crosses an invisible administrative line somewhere around 20th Avenue, well before they'd notice it on foot.

What's Inside the Line Right Now

Chris Harris, the city's redevelopment director, told commissioners the Main Street designation will shape how the city spends TIF dollars once they're consolidated in 2027, noting that the entire Music District sits within a tax increment financing zone the commission can already target for capital projects. His framing was blunt: this is just the beginning. The near-term plans commissioners heard about are ordinary Main Street basics: facade improvements on Midtown storefronts, streetscape work, and gateway signage marking the district's entrances. None of that has a firm completion date yet, and the city has not published a project list with addresses attached.

What already exists inside those same six blocks is the pair of murals honoring Vee-Jay Records and Denise Williams, both real threads in Gary's recorded-music history rather than the more commonly cited Jackson connection. Vee-Jay was one of the most significant Black-owned record labels of its era, and having its mural sit inside the boundary of a district built around music heritage is a more literal match than the geography of the Jackson 5 pieces, even if it's the Jackson murals that get the phone-out reaction from people driving through.

Walking It Without Waiting for the Signage

None of this requires waiting for gateway signs to go up. The Gary Public Transportation Corporation already maintains a self-guided Art and History Fitness Trail that maps Broadway's murals alongside older landmarks like Genesis Towers, City Hall, and the Lake County Courthouse, with a stop at the Gary Public Library and Cultural Center for the Maldonado mural unveiled there in 2018. That trail spans the full length of Broadway, downtown and Midtown both, which is the more honest picture of what's actually walkable on the street today versus what falls inside a specific state designation.

The practical read for anyone who lives near Broadway: the new name is real and the funding mechanism behind it is real, but it covers a narrower stretch of the street than the murals people already associate with Gary's music history. If you're headed out to see the Jackson 5 piece, you're headed downtown, not into the Music District. If you want to stand where the designation actually applies, the walk starts closer to 21st Avenue and the Vee-Jay Records and Denise Williams murals are your anchor points, not the ones everyone already has photos of.

Whichever end of Broadway you start from, the street is telling two overlapping stories right now, one funded through downtown blight grants and one just beginning to move through a Main Street nonprofit and a 2027 TIF plan. Knowing which six blocks belong to which story is the difference between wondering what the new signage means and knowing exactly where to stand to see it.

If you're watching what's happening along Broadway and want a read on how it connects to property values or timing in Gary, The Ace Broker is a straightforward call away.