Beverly Shores and the World's Fair Houses

Beverly Shores was the dream of real-estate developer Frederick Bartlett, who in nineteen twenty-seven bought thirty-six hundred acres of Indiana duneland along Lake Michigan and platted six thousand eight hundred lots for a resort community. Business was slow, and when his brother Robert took over and named the place for his own daughter Beverly, he hit on an unusual promotional stunt: after the Century of Progress World's Fair closed in Chicago in nineteen thirty-four, he purchased several of the futuristic model homes from the exhibition, had them barged across Lake Michigan, and installed them on the Beverly Shores lakefront. The House of Tomorrow, the Florida Tropical House, and others still stand there today, a cluster of experimental nineteen thirties architecture stranded in the Indiana dunes. They are now part of the Indiana Dunes National Park and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Century of Progress Architectural District.