A community activist group from Gary’s Aetna neighborhood, just east of downtown, is taking the lead in trying to get a state agency to someday provide financial help for revitalizing their community.
The Aetna Manor Revitalization Program has hopes they can turn their neighborhood’s business district (along Aetna Street from 9th to 12th avenues) into something thriving, instead of its current state of vacant storefronts.
The challenge, says their president, Penelope Love, is that the organization is structured for much smaller-scale projects.
“We’re the people who work to get the grass cut, the potholes filled or streetlights repaired. We work with the city to help them find where problems are,” Love said. “This is something bigger for us, We need to restore our neighborhood to what it once was. We want it bigger and better.”
Aetna formerly housed an explosives manufacturer, the Aetna Powder Co., and was a company town that predated Gary’s 1906 incorporation by 25 years. Its name carried over after it turned into a residential community with a business strip that was annexed into Gary in a process that stretched from 1925 to 1928.
The same decline that hit other parts of Gary also affected Aetna. Love said the reversal of that is their ultimate goal.
“We want to bring our neighborhood into the 21st Century and create jobs,” she said.
To that end, group members met Feb. 17 with officials from the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs, which operates under Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch and provides funding to organizations that run projects meant to increase public attention for businesses in distressed communities.
Gerry White, a community liaison for the 12 northwesternmost counties of Indiana, admitted that the Aetna Manor group is not typical of the organizations the agency works with. Most are affiliated with a local government, if not part of the municipality itself.
Still, he told Aetna Manor about the Indiana Main Street program that communities use to attract would-be customers to downtown businesses and provided guidelines on working with Gary government in order to qualify for state grants.
White said one benefit is that Aetna Manor already has status as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, which allows it to accept contributions and donors to write them off on their taxes.
He checked out the Aetna neighborhood, he said, and believes it has a historic character that the Aetna Manor group could use in revitalization efforts.
“The city of Gary is an interesting challenge, unlike anywhere else in Indiana,” White said, adding he thinks the Aetna Manor group ought to focus its attention now on beautification projects.
The neighborhood, “doesn’t have businesses now, so they should try to do everything they can to make (the Aetna Street strip) a pleasant environment that people would want to establish a business in.”
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Municipal staffers are watching the situation. Also attending the session was a Gary Redevelopment Commission staffer who said he represents Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson. Councilwoman Rebecca Wyatt, D-1st, also has met with the Aetna Manor group.
Aetna residents, numbering just under 5,000, are watching the goings-on.
Marjorie Woodyard, who lives in the home her parents had built in the neighborhood nearly 62 years ago, said people need to start acting now to prevent further decay. She said that while many of the neighborhood’s homes remain livable, one house down the block – the one-time childhood residence of former Chicago White Sox slugger Ron Kittle — “is a mess, and it’s a shame.”
Gregory Tejeda is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.