Gary Steel Works, Indiana

The Gary Works of U.S. Steel is the second largest steel works operating in the USA, with a steelmaking capability of 7.5 million tons of steel per year, employing around 5,100 people. It is separated from the Indiana Harbor Works, the largest plant, by a mile of beach, bookended by casinos. The heart of the plant is along a canal, the slip, with a turning basin at the end. This is the port for the plant, where coal arrives by barge, along with taconite iron ore from the company’s mines in Minnesota. On the east side is the taconite processing plant, and coal storage area. On the west side of the canal are the four blast furnaces at the plant, and the basic oxygen furnace shop. The coke works included three oven batteries which once provided up to 1.3 million tons of coke per year, until their closure in 2015. Extensive sheds at the site contain sheet and tin mills, pickle lines, reduction mills, hot rolled temper mills, annealing facilities, and other processing facilities. Over the course of its century, the plant has been the largest steel mill on earth, in the late 1930s exceeding the output of all of Germany. It employed 30,000 people in 1970.