It starts with loss of population, Novara said. It becomes a conundrum of decay in blighted city neighborhoods that once relied on public schools as a major anchor, said Marisa Novara, the Metropolitan Planning Council's director of housing and community development. He said he wishes the building could find a new purpose in the community.īut repurposing shuttered, disintegrating school buildings can be far easier said than done, an official with the Chicago-based urban-planning think tank Metropolitan Planning Council said. Last Tuesday, Williams exercised around the rubber-coated track of Lew Wallace, still trying to make use of the former school's grounds. 'They just found that girl inside of Emerson. 'Closed and abandoned buildings make the neighborhood not look safe,' Melba Johnson said. Multiple ground-level and second-story windows are completely missing, leaving the building's interior open to bad weather or anyone who wants to enter.Ībout five miles west of Emerson and Spaulding schools, Melba and Enoch Johnson live across the street from Brunswick Elementary School, now a partially boarded building surrounded by knee-high grass at 5701 W. Gary's former Spaulding Elementary School shares the same block as Emerson - and a similar fate.

The lessons of teachers once scrawled in chalk on blackboards at this former north side high school have been replaced with gang graffiti visible from the street.

The shattered windows of Gary's former Emerson School for Visual and Performing Arts provide gaping entryways for the elements, both natural and criminal.

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