Gary Mayor Eddie Melton’s administration scored its first big economic win this week as Gary-based Indiana Sugars announced it planned to relocate operations to Buffington Harbor, purchasing 77 acres, including property once home to the Majestic Star Casino and Hotel.
It almost didn’t happen.
Melton explained this week after the Monday announcement that Indiana Sugars nearly left Gary. He learned through a business channel the company, based in Gary since 1923, was considering relocating out of the city.
“We were hearing conversations of them looking at other locations,” said Melton who worried about losing a business that called Gary home for 101 years and has a significant number of workers.
Soon after, Melton and redevelopment director Christopher Harris began engaging company officials and landowner Transport Properties in talks to strike a deal. They sold Indiana Sugars on the benefits of Buffington Harbor, its deep-water port and proximity to intermodal transportation.
“They were impressed with the opportunities, and they see the potential and how it benefits their industry,” said Melton.
In this June 3, 1996, file photo, the Trump Casino sits on the dock in Buffington Harbor in Gary, Ind. In 1993, Trump swooped into Gary on his private jet and pledged to make the down-on-its-luck city great again with a riverboat casino along a Lake Michigan shoreline littered with shuttered factories. (
The move by Indiana Sugars reinforces Melton’s belief that Buffington Harbor was best suited for industry, not tourism.
Indiana Sugars purchased Buffington Harbor acreage from Transport Properties at an undisclosed purchase price. Melton’s office said no local or state incentives were used. Indiana Sugars officials declined an interview for this story.
Via a press release, Indiana Sugars president and chief operating officer John Yonover credited Melton and his team for its decision to stay in Gary.
“It was the engaging and thoughtful efforts of Mayor Eddie Melton and his team that has made sure that Indiana Sugars remains a Gary, Indiana based firm,” said Yonover.
“Mayor Melton and his team were passionate about our project and transparent that they didn’t want us to leave. They worked tirelessly with us to make a long-term arrangement that worked for both us and the City of Gary.”
Company’s Gary roots are more than a century old
Company patriarch Maurice Yonover founded the company in 1923 after first opening a grocery in Gary. The company soon evolved into a sugar distributor to candy companies.
It expanded at 911 Virginia St. in 1960, adding sugar processing. The company now produces blended sugar products, salt, flake salt, starches, grain and protein products. It further expanded operations to Illinois and Missouri after John Yonover joined the company in 1987.
About the time Maurice Yonover opened his grocery, Buffington Harbor opened in 1927 as a 55-acre harbor basin built to move raw materials, including the cement that built Gary. Universal Portland Cement had begun construction of a dock next to its cement plant two years earlier.
Officials named the harbor after U.S. Steel official Eugene J. Buffington who founded the Gary Land Co. in 1906 and directed a street grid for the young city.
Vice President Charles G. Dawes was the guest of honor along with 3,000 attendees at the harbor’s grand opening as the Great Lakes’ deepest port. The $3 million harbor featured the latest technology, including electrical conveyor belts that carried raw material from the dock to storage facilities.
The Great Depression weakened the cement industry as demand fell. In 1980, Lehigh Cement Co purchased the cement division of U.S. Steel in a deal that included the Buffington plant.
Buffington’s shift to casinos
In the 1990s, Indiana legalized gambling and two casino boats, including one owned by former President Donald Trump, docked at sleepy, gritty Buffington Harbor. Then-mayor Scott King viewed the boats as a lever to jump-start tourism and revive the city’s sagging economy, dogged by steel mill downsizing and crime.
Trump and businessman Donald Barden bought one-third of the Buffington property for $13.5 million. In 2000, Lehigh sold the remaining portion to the city for $25 million. King envisioned a residential, retail and recreational development on the site of the cement plant, but the dream never materialized.
Trump opened a 300-room hotel in 1998, making promises to revive the city. It didn’t happen.
In 2004, Trump Hotel & Casino filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Trump sold his stake in the Gary casino to Barden’s Majestic Star in 2005 for $253 million.
The Gary boats made money, but typically lagged behind other region casinos in revenue. The hotel suffered from low occupancy rates.
In 2019, Indiana lawmakers enacted a bill allowing Gary to open a land-based casino at 29th Avenue and Burr Street, just off the Borman Expressway. The Hard Rock Casino opened in 2021.
Gary lawmakers and then-mayor Karen Freeman Wilson backed the move to redevelop Buffington Harbor back to its industrial roots.
Gary’s two boats are gone now, and the casino pavilion, hotel and other remnants have been demolished.
Elements of a 2019 Senate bill authored by Melton to establish a shipping, warehousing intermodal compact to govern operations at Buffington Harbor were added into the land-based casino bill. The compact never emerged, but lawmakers backed a study committee that confirmed Buffington Harbor’s potential to transform the region.
Indiana Sugars is viewed as a key move by Melton to establish the intermodal transportation hub.
“With Buffington Harbor, we have to be intentional in diversifying business and industry,” said Melton. “I’ve been in multiple conversations with the Biden administration as we look at being more creative and innovative with our proximity to Chicago.
“We’re really positioned to be on the lake for more opportunities than just steel, but it will always be a part of our economy and in our DNA,” he said.
Carole Carlson is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
