Gary’s Fellowship Gardens
Fellowship Gardens was a public housing project built in Gary, Indiana. The name is an alternative religious iteration of “friendship garden”. Right from its start, the development gained a very bad reputation. It was doomed.
The City of Gary was dying a bit at a time month by month. The CCC (Concerned Citizens Committee) was a laughable joke. Not even a decade prior, CCC was a very powerful grassroots entity with the ability to effect great change. Now they sat on the sidelines with everyone else and watched their city fade away right before their eyes.
Situated at 15th Avenue & Fairbanks Street, Fellowship Gardens was a 14.5-acre low-income project basically in the middle of nowhere, but along a main road leading into Hammond. It was built by the First Baptist Church of Gary under the direction of Pastor Robert E. Penn. Penn was on the Board of Directors of Fellowship Gardens, Inc. The entity worked in conjunction with the Federal Housing Authority.
The complex was supposed to be more expansive than it ended up becoming. An entire 1/4 of the back property was never developed.
Some addresses I found were 6460 W 15th, apartment G, and 6540 W 15th Avenue. Some businesses that were nearby were Prothos Wrecking, Westside Daycare, and the candy store in the woods?!?! I don’t know anything about that, I need a classic Garyite to fill me in lol
Some bus routes that passed it went as follows:
25th & Grant>W 11th Avenue>Fellowship Gardens>w 19th Avenue/Black Oak>w 21st Ave/Tarrytown… and so on. The West 11th Ave/Fellowship Gardens ran west, down 11 Avenue from Broadway to the end of the line, which was The Fellowship Gardens.
There was a legendary fight between Fellowship Gardens and Concord Commons at the Gardens basketball court. I don’t know the circumstances, but it was a neighborhood/gang rivalry from what I could gather. Besides the Fellowship Gardens Gang, there were Black Inc., Concord, Small Farmers, and of course, The Family. The fight resulted in dozens of people going to jail.
Those who lived at Fellowship went to Ivanhoe, Edison, and West Side.
1973 was an especially bad year for murders in Gary because of The Family Street Gang. It was said that The Family killed someone and was kind enough to drop the body off at Andrew Smith’s Funeral Home after the deed was done.
The Fellowship Gardens Gang by itself committed 3–4 murders and over 100 robberies in the neighborhood in 1975 alone. There were other murders perpetrated by the gang outside of the project.
The FGG was by no means the only violent player running around then. The Kangaroos, The Purple Gang, The 11th Ave Syndicate, The Ross Family, The Brotherhood, and the One Ways. Many neighborhoods had their own gangs named after them. Generally if one stayed inside a Garde, Manor, Terrace, or Court, you were in the projects.
The project was the victim of numerous arson and general fires. In 1976, three kids died in a fire at 1341 Fairbanks after being left alone by their mother, Eva Jones. Jones lost all her possessions again in a second apartment fire in the Horace Mann neighborhood a year later. She was in the hospital pregnant with her fourth child at the time.
Surviving Fellowship Gardens was like having a badge of honor. Yet, one could say the same for the whole city in general. Many skills could be obtained from Gary’s streets. One was thieving.
When Fellowship Gardens closed, every stove and refrigerator in the complex was stolen and sold underground. It got so bad the police had to escort new refrigerator deliveries in many neighborhoods. Anything that wasn’t nailed to the ground was stolen and sold off.
The apartments closed in 1978. In 1980, Gary’s GNS tried to obtain $4 million from the government to rehabilitate the complex, but it is unknown why it never happened. By 1983, Fellowship Gardens was abandoned and slated for demolition. Even abandoned, the complex was a dangerous place where criminals took women to be assaulted and make drug deals. In 1985, a woman was set on fire after being rap*d.
Demolition commenced in 1987, yet even while being destroyed, Fellowship Gardens had one more secret to give up. A human skeleton was found near 13th & Stevenson Street. It was dressed in a pinstriped suit, dark green shirt, and grey shoes, with a campaign button promoting the mayoral campaign of Thomas B. Barnes.
15th & Fairbanks wasn’t developed into a trucking park until after 1994.
There are basically zero ground photos of Fellowship Gardens available to the public, if they exist at all.