The rise and fall of the Genesis Convention Center in Gary, IN, and what comes after it on its downtown block

By July 1982, the Genesis Convention Center was open in downtown Gary, Indiana. The city's symphony played there that month, and seniors walked in for free. Before the year was out, Prince had played the arena.

Over the next decades the building held Chicago Bulls exhibitions, two Miss USA pageants, and, by 2009, a wedding almost every weekend from spring into fall.

In December 2019 the funeral for Richard Hatcher, the mayor whose administration built the hall, was held inside it. The building closed in 2020.

In 2021 a technology company had agreed to buy the empty hall for its headquarters. That deal fell through. In October 2026 the excavators started on its walls.

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Genesis opens across from City Hall

At 5:30 on the afternoon of July 11, 1982, the Gary Civic Symphony Orchestra played a new hall in downtown Gary, Indiana, alongside the Gary Civic Choral Ensemble and the just-formed Gary Municipal Chorus.

Seniors got in on free passes. Gold Circle patrons paid $10.

The hall was the Genesis Convention Center, open to the public by that summer on the block west of Broadway between West 4th and West 5th avenues, with City Hall across the street.

Mayor Richard Hatcher's administration built it to keep big gatherings, shows, and convention business downtown while stores and residents left the core and newer, car-oriented development pulled trade to the south and east.

Genesis cost $14 million, all of it federal money.

Its architect, a Northwest Indiana native who had been the first president of the National Organization of Minority Architects, gave the building a steel frame clad in brick and light-colored metal panels.

The arena inside could switch between a concert, a basketball game, a banquet, and a graduation on the same open floor.

That June, with crews finishing the last of the work, the center was promoted as a 9,000-seat stop for concerts and conventions.

Before 1982 was out, Prince had played the arena, with Vanity 6 and The Time on the bill.

The hotel next door closes

When Genesis opened, a 14-story hotel stood just east of it, built as a Holiday Inn and later run as a Sheraton. That hotel closed in 1985.

From then on the convention center had no full-service hotel nearby, while the Holiday Star Theatre in Merrillville, open since 1979 at Interstate 65 and U.S. 30, kept a hotel and plenty of parking around its 3,400-seat house.

Gary's own calendar filled the building. In October 1986 a federal environmental review held a public meeting in the small Hoosier Room.

The Chicago Bulls, the Indiana Pacers, and the Harlem Globetrotters played exhibitions on the arena floor, and in the 1990s banquets, church functions, school programs, dances, and job fairs took up the weeks between the larger bookings.

The building also became the place where the city's political history came back downtown.

On September 27, 1997, Genesis hosted the 25th-anniversary celebration of the 1972 National Black Political Convention, an event Gary had held before the hall existed.

A renovation for Miss USA and basketball

In June 2000 Genesis sat inside a much larger financing fight.

Gary wanted to secure bonds with about a third of four years of riverboat gaming income, funding a $47 million public-works package that stretched from Genesis renovation and parking work to a new baseball stadium.

For the convention center, two arrivals added urgency: a new Continental Basketball Association team and a promised three-year run of Miss USA.

The council's first answer was unanimous: wait until its regular July meeting. The mayor did not wait.

He called a special meeting for later in June, where the resolution passed five to four.

Two council members went to court in July, with the special meeting among their objections.

A judge ordered them to post a $2.35 million bond.

They did not, the case was dismissed in September, and the Indiana Supreme Court upheld that dismissal in January 2001.

The work went ahead. On March 2, 2001, Miss USA was staged in the arena, and on March 1, 2002, the pageant went out live from Genesis.

The Gary Steelheads, who had started playing there around 2000, signed an arena license in July 2001.

By the early 2000s the upstairs meeting rooms had been redecorated, and the Red Ribbon Lounge had been redone to hold about 200 people.

The pageant had been promised for three years. It came twice.

A full calendar that never paid its costs

By the late 2000s the calendar was crowded with ordinary bookings.

In 2008 Genesis took in about $0.8 million against about $2.2 million in operating expenses, and from 2005 through the 2009 year-to-date figures its revenue never reached half of what the building cost to run.

Trade shows and church and school meetings used the halls, weddings ran almost every weekend from March through October, and the Red Ribbon Lounge mixed weekly public nights with private parties.

The Steelheads added to it.

Under the February 2006 arrangement the city paid $144,300 directly to Gary Hoops and got none of the team revenue it was supposed to receive for the rest of the CBA season.

The trouble had started earlier: by the 2003-04 season the operator had stopped paying under its original license.

After the 2005-06 season the Steelheads left the CBA for another league, and by 2009 the team no longer played.

In 2009 the city cut the center's budget, and seven full-time maintenance jobs went with the cuts.

The parking deck had been rated in fair-to-poor condition in 2008.

A closing in 2020 and a failed sale

The Gary Splash played home games in the arena from 2010 through 2013.

In June 2016 the hall hosted a new National Black Political Convention, and on November 4, 2018, a former president held a get-out-the-vote rally there, with free tickets handed out in advance.

That same year the city was openly considering a sale of the building.

Richard Hatcher's visitation was held at Genesis from noon to 8 p.m. on December 20, 2019, and his funeral followed there the next afternoon.

The building closed in 2020.

In late 2020 and January 2021, Akyumen Industries, a technology company, agreed to buy Genesis for $2.5 million and make it its U.S. headquarters and a temporary manufacturing site.

The company failed to pay the full price by its July 2021 deadline, and the city's Redevelopment Commission sued to get the property back.

No headquarters opened. In 2022 Gary got the closed building back, along with the job of keeping it maintained and secure.

Six redevelopment plans, then demolition

Gary asked for reuse ideas in June 2025 and received seven.

A formal request issued in January 2026 drew six proposals, among them senior housing and a ballroom-and-bowling entertainment complex.

By then scrappers had stripped electrical and mechanical equipment out of the building, and an assessment put the basic repair bill at $10 million or more, before structural or cosmetic work.

The April selection date passed without an award.

At the end of April 2026 the mayor announced that Genesis would be demolished, and in June the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority accepted a $2.87 million bid from McDonagh Demolition to take down the hall, its garage, and the former Gordon's Department Store complex.

Excavators started on the exterior on October 16, 2026.

The Genesis Convention Center is a demolition site.

Large sections of the main hall have been torn open while parts of it still stand, and the four-story garage is scheduled to come down in early November.

Plans the city made public in October 2026 fold the block into a larger downtown rebuilding, with a civic plaza that would carry a permanent marker of the site's cultural history.

As late as 2009, the hall expected 434 events in a single year.

Excavators are now working through the arena and the banquet rooms that held them.