“Come look,” said Jack Jaffe, a retired businessman and photography buff. Through the large windows of his lakefront home in Indiana, through the trees and past the dunes, a fiery orange sun could be seen sliding into Lake Michigan. “Do you see such things in Chicago?” he asked.
Miller sprang up in the late 1800s as a settlement for railroad workers, many of whom were Norwegian. The community incorporated as a town in 1907, and a dozen years later it was annexed by Gary.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Many Chicagoans built summer cottages in Miller. Wealthier residents built some landmark homes, including one designed by Prairie school disciples George Fred and William Keck, a stone structure with non-opening windows and side louvers for ventilation. In the late 50s Nelson Algren, displaced from his city apartment when the Kennedy Expressway was being built, settled into a Miller cottage for a few years. He would hike the dunes or take his rowboat out onto the lagoon in Miller’s Marquette Park. He spent part of one summer there romancing French author Simone de Beauvoir, according to Algren’s longtime friend Dave Peltz, a construction contractor.
Three years later Richard Hatcher ran for mayor on a pro-civil-rights and antipollution ticket–and excited the fears of whites. After he assumed office, whites drained out of Gary’s neighborhoods. At first, few whites fled Miller. In part that was because the area had developed a liberal core of residents, among them the Jaffes, who had backed Hatcher early on. After he was elected, many liberal Jews moved there from Gary’s west side–attracted in part by the Reform Temple Israel, whose rabbi, Carl Miller, took a positive stance on integration and exerted moral influence over his congregants.
But the MCC also tackled social causes. In the 70s, under MCC pressure, the Gary city council enacted a ban on for-sale signs. A few years ago an MCC subcommittee on the public schools took on poor busing and the lack of textbooks. Another committee is now monitoring how the courts deal with the burglaries and car thefts that bedevil the neighborhood.
However, the Miller schools still fail to evidence much integration; all have predominantly black student bodies. The best school academically is Nobel, a brick facility with two separate playgrounds nestled into the dunes in east Miller. The school runs only through the sixth grade, after which the kids move to a nearby junior high. On Indiana’s standardized tests in reading and math, Nobel sixth-graders perform a year and sometimes two years ahead of national norms. Yet in spite of the obvious quality of the teaching, Nobel’s student population is only 5 percent white.
Yet in other areas, Miller is undergoing a resurgence. There’s a renewed interest in living in Miller’s dunes, and home prices, stagnant for so long, have been bounding upward. Places on the water, all of which are set back on an apron of dune, now range in price from $150,000 to $275,000, according to realtor Gene Ayers. (Houses in Miller still sell for 30 percent less than those in nearby Chesterton.) The sale of a cottage near the water, in such disrepair that Ayers is not sure it’s salvageable, is pending–at $89,000.
