Marquette Park (Gary, Indiana)

 beach, park, lake, dunes, interesting place

www.gary.in.us/visit_out.asp

Marquette Park is a city park located within the city of Gary, Indiana. One of its primary elements is 1.4 miles (2.2 km) of Lake Michigan beach frontage. It is adjacent to the Gary neighborhood of Miller Beach, and is a National Landmark of Soaring.

History:

Until 1837, the parcel of sandy land that is now Marquette Park was a section of dunes waterfront at the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan, where the Grand Calumet river then emptied into the lake. In that year the settlement of Indiana City was founded and laid out at the Grand Calumet's mouth as a rival port to nearby Chicago, which had also recently been founded. However, Indiana City failed to grow as expected. It remained on maps until the 1880s but gradually faded into a ghost town.

Later, this stretch of duneland became the site of key hang gliding experiments carried out in 1896-1897 by a team led by the pioneering aeronaut Octave Chanute.

Much of the land that now makes up the city of Gary was acquired at this time by a new industrial giant, the United States Steel Corporation, for integrated steelmaking purposes.

In 1919 U.S. Steel, having built its mill complex and found it had some beachfront left over, donated this beachfront land to the city of Gary.

During the prosperous 1920s, Gary invested a significant sum in landscaping the park. The Marquette Park Pavilion was built adjacent to the beachfront, and most of a wetland area behind the beach, formerly part of the Grand Calumet River, was excavated to form the Marquette Lagoon by contractor Gus Strom. Two Japanese-inspired bridges span the lagoon today.

From 1919 to 1932 the park was named Lake Front Park, and its pavilion was the Lake Front Pavilion. The Gary Parks and Recreation Master Plan recounts the park's further history:

"In 1931 W. P. Gleason, the Superintendent of the Gary Steel Works and Superintendent of the Gary Park Department, commissioned Henry Hering of New York to create a bronze statue of Father Père Marquette to be placed at the gateway to the park, which was renamed Marquette Park with the dedication of the statue in July of 1932.

The bathhouse, now renamed the "Aquatorium", was built in 1921 and as a bathhouse it is a unique structure in the portfolio of its architect, George Washington Maher, who also designed the Pavilion. The Aquatorium is on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places, one of two Miller buildings on the Register (the other being the Miller Town Hall at Grand Blvd and Miller Ave). For years after it was built it was a focal point of Miller, drawing visitors from all over the region and Illinois on the hot days of summer. Gradually falling into disrepair, it was closed in the 1960's. In the 1990's efforts to restore it were undertaken by The Aquatorium Society. Since then, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been raised for its restoration and, in the spring of 1997, the Gary City Council appropriated one million dollars for another phase of its restoration."