The city was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation as the home for its new plant. The city was named after the chairman of U.S. Steel, Elbert H. Gary.

Among U.S. cities of 100,000 or more, Gary has the highest percentage of African-American residents (as of the 2000 U.S. census). Gary had one of the nation's first African-American mayors, Richard G. Hatcher, and hosted the ground-breaking 1972 National Black Political Convention. At the same time, Gary suffered the urban phenomenon of "white flight" as many Caucasian residents left Gary and relocated to the surrounding towns and cities.

Gary's fortunes have risen and fallen with those of the steel industry. In the 1960s, like many other American urban centers, Gary entered a downward spiral of decline. Gary's decline was brought on by layoffs at the steel plants. US Steel continues to be a major steel producer, but with only a fraction of its former level of employment. While Gary has failed to attract many major businesses since its population peak, two casinos opened along the Gary lakeshore in the 1990s. Today, Gary faces numerous difficulties, including unemployment, major economic problems, and a high rate of crime.

In the 1957 Meredith Wilson's Broadway musical The Music Man featured the song, "Gary, Indiana," describing the alleged alma mater of lead character Professor Harold Hill ("Gary Conservatory, Class of '05!"). The joke in Hill's claim, of course, is that the city of Gary wasn't founded until '06. Wilson's musical, set in 1912, was later made into two movies.

Before his recent legal troubles, singer and famous former Gary resident Michael Jackson visited the city and promised to build a performing arts center for Gary, though this has not yet come to pass.

Gary/Chicago International Airport is a proposed "third airport" for the Chicagoland area, supplementing Chicago's overcrowded major airports, O'Hare and Midway. Expanding Gary/Chicago Airport is considered an alternative to expanding O'Hare and constructing a new airport at Peotone, Illinois, 43 miles south of Chicago. Advantages of expanding the Gary airport include its proximity to downtown Chicago (making it preferable to the Peotone site) and its vacant surroundings; whereas expanding O'Hare would threaten nearby homes and businesses and constructing a Peotone airport would threaten farms, the land around Gary/Chicago Airport is relatively underutilized. This plan is backed by the mayors of Gary and Chicago, while the Illinois state government is in favor of construction at Peotone. Tax revenues from a new airport at Peotone would go to the Illinois state government, while those from an expanded Gary airport would go to a regional airport authority, and thus to the cities of Chicago and Gary.

Three-term Democratic mayor Scott King resigned from office in March, 2006, citing a desire to return to private law practice, and the financial rewards involved therein. Then-deputy mayor and former Calumet Township Trustee Dozier T. Allen Jr. became acting mayor, pending a formal election by local Democratic party officials. On April 4, 2006, local officials chose former Lake County Commissioner and King rival Rudolph Clay to fill the remaining 21 months of King's term.

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