Powers & Sons Construction Company

Powers & Sons Construction Company is a general contractor and construction manager headquartered in Gary, Indiana with an office in Indianapolis, founded in 1967 and family-owned across three generations. The firm works in K-12 and higher education, municipal and civic buildings, transit, healthcare and multifamily across Indiana and the Chicago area. Powers & Sons is one of seven Chicago-area minority- and locally-owned firms in the Chicago Community Builders Collective, the joint venture with Gilbane Building Company holding the general contract on Bally’s $1.7 billion casino resort at the former Tribune Freedom Center site. That structure came out of the casino license conditions, and it is one of the larger tests of delivering participation commitments through a real joint venture rather than tiered subcontracts.

Mamon Powers, Sr. moved north from Mississippi to Gary after the Second World War and was, by the firm’s own account, Indiana’s first Black apprentice. He opened the company in 1967 building single-family houses on Gary’s west side. The last one went up at 4925 Monroe Street in 1979, and after that the business turned entirely to commercial work.

Since 1967 the firm reports more than $1 billion in completed business.

Some of the more consequential jobs show how far the work moved from residential. Powers & Sons provided construction management on the U.S. Steel Yard, the 6,000-seat open-air ballpark that houses the Gary SouthShore RailCats, in 2002. It served as construction manager on the $60.5 million Phase IV and the $275 million Phase V expansions of the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. In 2016 it won one of the State of Indiana’s first construction manager as constructor contracts, for Purdue University’s $74 million Honors College & Residences. It was also a founding member of Lakeside Alliance, the five-firm joint venture selected to build the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

The firm keeps carpenters, tradespeople and labourers on its own payroll alongside project executives, estimators, project managers, project engineers and site superintendents, and it has professional engineers, registered architects, LEED Accredited Professionals and LEED Green Associates on staff.

Four offices now carry the work: 2636 West 15th Avenue in Gary, 355 Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis, and two in Chicago, at 8770 W Bryn Mawr Avenue on the north side and 5040 S State Street on the south. Portfolio sectors run corporate and office, higher education, health care, cultural and public works, hospitality and retail, industrial, K-12, mixed-use and residential, and religious.