Gary Bathing Beach Aquatorium: Steel City's Lakefront Dream

In nineteen twenty-one, the steel city of Gary, Indiana built a grand lakefront bathhouse on the Lake Michigan shore. The architect was George Washington Maher, and he designed the Gary Bathing Beach Aquatorium almost entirely from six basic cast concrete block shapes, making it one of the earliest examples of modular precast concrete construction in American architecture.

In its heyday the building offered changing rooms, showers, bathing suit rentals, and second-floor galleries with views of the Chicago skyline twenty-five miles down the shore. It was the social heart of the Miller Beach neighborhood.

After decades of use it closed in nineteen seventy-one and fell into disrepair. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-four, it has since been converted into a museum honoring aviation pioneers Octave Chanute and the Tuskegee Airmen, two very different legacies of flight.