State Line Generating Plant, Hammond

A Lakefront Power Site

The former State Line plant shows Hammond as an energy city as well as a manufacturing one. A coal station of this scale reorganized shoreline land, rail service, and regional emissions in ways that went far beyond one fenced parcel.

Even after demolition, that scale still reads on the site. The campus remains a piece of utility geography first and a redevelopment parcel second.

From Coal Plant To Data Campus

Digital Crossroad's own project material makes the conversion explicit: a former generating station became the base for a new data-center campus. That change is striking not simply for the new use, but for what it says about how industrial lakefronts are being repackaged in the region.

The shift is not a clean break from the past. It keeps the same large-parcel logic, the same utility orientation, and the same strategic geography while changing the form of infrastructure on the site.

A Borderland Industrial Site

State Line is hard to read in city-only terms. The plant belonged to a Hammond lakefront that also touched Whiting's refinery zone and the broader Calumet air shed.

The borderland setting also gives the site unusual comparative value. Few Hammond places make the overlap between utility infrastructure, regional pollution history, and current redevelopment this visible.