Beauty and rebirth in decay. It's a vision of urban exploration, restoration and development

now underway across northwest Indiana.

Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

It's an American ruin, the once grand long abandoned city Methodist church in Gary, Indiana. Extraordinary details still hidden in plain sight everywhere.

It's still beautiful.

Oh, look at that window. Wow.

Even as the roofless structure itself barely offers cover from the pouring rain.

Our guides Gary natives Terrell Anderson and Lori Gonzalez, urban explorers who've been visiting buildings like this

for more than a decade, taking photographs

and crucially documenting the history.

There's still beauty and destruction. Like if you see all these

different beautiful things you can imagine what it used to look like in its hey day.

You know that it's not going to be a church's it once was, but how can you beautify any aspect of it to tell

the history side of it?

A history that for this church dates to 1926, with decades as a segregated whites only congregation before

eventually closing its doors in 1975. They refused to integrate so when people begin to move out their congregation numbers dwindle.

It's in some ways a microcosm of Gary's history, an industrial city that lost more than

half its population since the 1960s

driven by fewer steel jobs and white flight. Today there are some 10,000 abandoned buildings throughout the city, including Union Station, making

Gary something of a Mecca for people like Lori and Terrell who are drawn to Erbex or Urban Exploration.

I saw in the back of your sweatshirt.

It says, I play in abandoned buildings.

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