The glass trophy cabinet outside the auditorium stood empty. The girls’ vintage basketball gymnasium retained its original wooden floors and charm. In the band room, musical instruments, orchestra equipment, and drum major uniforms remained untouched.
After being closed for six years, Gary’s storied Roosevelt High School opened its doors this week for a cleanup effort. The four-day project stirred pride and nostalgia as loyal alumni, community members, and curious visitors came to view the building’s condition since it closed in 2019.
Among them was John King, Roosevelt Class of 1989. On Tuesday, June 3, while surveying the band room, King discovered a four-foot bassoon still in its case.
“Wow,” he said. “This is something,” he told Judith Mead, president of the National Gary Theodore Roosevelt Alumni Association.
Textbooks, binders, computers, file cabinets, desks, tables, copy machines, and other furniture—left untouched since the school’s closing—filled more than 80 classrooms across the 700,000-square-foot building. Hallways were cluttered with desks and tables.
The small group of 20 volunteers—some Roosevelt alumni and members of the preservation group Decay Devils—faced a daunting task. Wearing gloves and face masks, they sorted and packed items cleared from the second floor. After nearly a century of serving as a pillar of education, Roosevelt’s legacy was being carefully packed into boxes.
A volunteer assembles packing boxes during a cleanup project at the vacant Roosevelt High School in Gary.
The cleanup effort was led by the Indiana Landmarks Black Heritage Preservation Program, a division of Indiana Landmarks, under Director Eunice Trotter. The goal was to make Roosevelt presentable to potential investors interested in repurposing the historic school. The building remains owned by the Gary Community School Corporation.
“This is history, our history,” Trotter said. “We need to preserve buildings like this because they tell an important story about us and our past.”
The cleanup focused on the second floor, including the auditorium’s front entrance. Classrooms and administrative offices were cleared of desks, books, and furniture. Items were relocated to the D Building, where students once studied woodshop, auto mechanics, and other trade skills.
Despite being closed since 2019, the school is in remarkably good condition. The two gymnasiums, auditorium, cafeteria, library, and band room show minimal signs of damage.
“The bones of this school are exceptional,” Mead said. “Workers back then built schools like this with the best materials. They didn’t cut corners. This building is in good shape.”
On the first floor, Roosevelt’s band room was intact. Band uniforms—and even the Panther mascot outfit—hung in closets. (Mead noted that the Panther head is at West Side Leadership Academy.) Instruments, including trumpets, clarinets, tubas, and French horns, remained in their cases, some labeled from Lew Wallace High School and Pulaski Middle School. Mead said those instruments were transferred to Roosevelt after the other schools closed.
In the band room, Mead, King, and others packed dozens of T-shirts, uniforms, and instruments into bags and boxes, which were stored for potential future use. Security was present to ensure items remained on-site.
For many alumni, the project offered a final walk through the school’s hallowed halls and its elegant auditorium. The experience was bittersweet. Some recalled Roosevelt’s famous alumni—actor Avery Brooks, members of the Jackson family, and NBA star Dick Barnett, who passed away last month. Others shared memories of Principal H. Theo Tatum, Coach Ron Heflin, and favorite teachers.
King, whose mother graduated from Roosevelt in 1951, led the Crusader on a tour of the building, highlighting rooms once used as a laundry, store, medical clinic, and choir space.
“Roosevelt is about pride and Blackness,” King said. “That’s why this school was established. It was built for disenfranchised people who they thought would not amount to anything.” He praised the dedication of Black educators who empowered their students to excel.
Other volunteers, like Ingrid Fogle, also had deep ties to Roosevelt. “There are a lot of memories here. That’s important,” said Fogle, Class of 1985. “It was kind of disheartening because I thought the school would be open forever. People back then went out of their way to come here.”
“I really can’t put into words what Roosevelt means to me,” said Charisse Davis, who graduated in 1980. “I’m a history buff, and Roosevelt is a big part of my life. When I bleed, I bleed black and gold.”
Volunteers clean the girls’ gymnasium during the Roosevelt High School cleanup project this week.
Trotter admitted that nostalgia occasionally slowed progress, but she understood the emotional connection.
Trotter, whose entire family graduated from the historically Black Crispus High School in Indianapolis, recognizes the cultural weight of Roosevelt’s legacy.
Roosevelt High School was built in 1929 after Black students were denied entry to Emerson High School in 1927. Gary’s segregation laws barred Black and white students from learning together. Then-Superintendent William Wirt, a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, built the school in the Midtown section of Gary specifically for Black students.
At its height, the stately Colonial Revival school—now listed on the National Register of Historic Places—enrolled more than 3,000 students, making it one of the largest African American high schools in the Midwest. Roosevelt’s primary rival was Froebel High School, which allowed Black students but barred them from extracurriculars. Froebel closed in 1977 due to budget cuts.
In 2012, the state took over Roosevelt and converted it into Roosevelt College and Career Academy, managed by EdisonLearning. The academic turnaround effort cost $31 million but failed.
In February 2019, students were relocated to the Gary Area Career Center after burst pipes flooded Roosevelt’s building. With just over 400 students and estimated repairs in the millions, the Indiana State Board of Education closed the school in 2020. The final graduating class had just 34 students. Later that year, Indiana Landmarks and Roosevelt alumni placed a historic marker in front of the school.
In 2023, a coalition—including the Gary East Side Community Development Corporation, the National Gary Theodore Roosevelt Alumni Association, Indiana Landmarks Black Heritage Preservation Program, and others—began exploring feasible reuse strategies for Roosevelt.
In 2024, Indiana Landmarks helped secure national attention by successfully nominating Roosevelt to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
On April 19, Indiana Landmarks held a community meeting to discuss potential uses for the building and presented preliminary design concepts inspired by earlier focus group feedback.