Hammond, Indiana: Then and Now

Oh wow ! I cried looking at this I sure miss our old Downtown Hammond man oh man I really don't like all this change I'am 68 yrs old .Thank you so much for sharing this with us, God Bless you .

💔💔💔It is very sad to see a city with beautiful architecture in the past and today, the same area is a vacant lot. Great video! Thank you for sharing!

I wanted to take a ride down memory lane this rainy afternoon, and found this! Thank you for this beautiful labor of love, which evokes both joy and sadness. Spring is coming, may there be new life for Hammond!

Wow! That overpass really took out a lot of the city.

Downtown Hammond used to be great place- Loved going at Christmas time for goldblatts windows

Thank you so much for posting this!! My father was born in Hammond and he was so proud of that fact. He loved Hammond, (AKA Hessville when he was really little) and used to tell me stories about growing up in Hammond with his two best friends Max, and Dennis. My father passed away in 2016 and I wish he was here so that I could share this video with him and ask SO many questions about the streets and if he recognized anything, especially the movie theater where he and his buddies would watch the lastest serials and movies coming out, a little person selling Buster Brown shoes in a Woolworths, the Hammond Times where my aunt worked, and playing football for Hammond High. Thank you for the smile, and the memory of his stories I needed it!!

I grew up in North Hammond on Sheffield & 142nd. The whole block was my family. What a great way to grow up.

I grew up in St.John in the 60s my grandmother and I would take the bus to Hammond to shop and sight see, riding the elevator at Goldblats, going to the Parthenon, and the Army Surplus store, getting a Hamburger at the quikee stop...it was a great place. St John was a small farm town back then

Very good graphic summary of Hammond, Indiana. It is officially gone...

I am from east Chicago Indiana, Hammond, Indiana was a great city back in the day, great video.

I am proud to have been born in Hammond and also raised in Hammond. I wish I could time travel back in time and see it when it was thriving❤️

Born at St Margarets in 1947. This town breathed its last gasp into the last generation of the Industrial Age. It's like watching my own death from the distance I placed between me and my hometown.

Kind of depressing! I have lived most of my life in Hammond and was downtown during my teens up until it all went away, 1970's and on. There were some great shops!

While I do have fond memories of living in Northern Indiana, I do not regret moving to the south…ever.

OMG great video 👍 My Mom would take all of us to Goldblatts to shop all through the 70s. all of us were like " Hurry up ma we gotta get to Waynes Trick Shop 😂🤣😂 he would always show you a magic trick, then we would go to Army Navy surplus and beg her for a tent or a knife 🤣😂🤣😂 OMG those were the days

Thats really sad. Once a booming town, and now a ghost town.

WOW!!! Could not watch this without tears in my eyes!!! Great stuff!! 😔Ilene

I was born in Hammond in the late 2000's (2008) I sure miss living there...

The politicians said that they needed to build the overpass to save downtown Hammond. They managed to get millions of dollars budgeted into a congressional bill but we would see a penny of it for ten to twenty years, because that's how money is appropriated at the federal level. By the time the overpass was completed downtown Hammond was dead and no overpass was going to save it. The overpass stands there today as a monument to the absurdity of trying to avoid the inevitable. Downtown Hammond died because we didn't need it. We had the new Malls. Then the Malls started dying because we have Amazon. Someday Amazon will be replaced by something else. Someday we'll learn that we can't stop change.

Sadly, down town Hammond was done once Goldblatts closed. I remember my mom taking me and my brothers to downtown Hammond. We'd hit about all the stores. From JC Penney & Jupiters to Goldblatts. I remember having lunch with my mom at the diners in Jupiters and Walgreens. My dad took us to see The Poseidon Adventure at the Paramount back in 1972..... My last memory was skipping school with friends and taking the bus up to Goldblatts in about 1980 or 81, when I was in high school.