My trip to Indiana - Part 3 (warning: even more pictures behind the cuts)
When I arrived in Beverly Shores, the first thing I noticed was that the temperature suddenly dropped. When I left Michigan City, it was still warm enough for me to sweat in my shirt. Fifteen minutes and two miles later, it was chilly enough to make me wonder if I should put on the jacket again. As I looked in the direction of Chicago, I could see an entire sky full of thick clouds drifting in my direction.
This was especially starting since the sky looked pretty clear when I turned around.
Over the next two hours, the clouds made their way east. By the time I left Beverly Shores, they covered the sky everywhere I looked.
Anyway... After taking a look around, I decided to take a closer look at Beverly Shores station.
During the first half of the 20th century, this was one of the several stations scatted along the long stretch of rail tracks between Gary and Michigan City. They served the many small villages and resorts that used to line the shores of Lake Michigan. People from Chicago and other, smaller cities came here to vacation. But none of them were ever really all that popular. From 1950s onward, less and less people came during the summer. The people who lived there full-time started to move away. In some cases, this got so bad that the once-thriving villages were either reduced to a few houses or vanished altogether, becoming part of the growing Indiana Dune National Lakeshore park.
When NICTD took control of South Shore Line, it's officials realized that many of the stops were have become pointless, so they closed most of them down and replaced them with a new, consolidated stop. Beverly Shores station is the only one that survived intact.
Looking inside, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a neat waiting room. It was nice in a quaint sort of way. There was a rack filled with free newspapers and brochures out back, and there were two surprisingly clean bathrooms.
The waiting room and bathrooms take up about a third of the station house. The rest has been converted into a gallery that doubles as a South Shore Line themed souvenir shop. Unfortunately, it was closed (this seems to be a recurring theme in this trip, doesn't it)
Here is a picture of the building from the side, just to give you an idea of how big it actually is:
Beverly Shores station is a flag stop. This means that the train doesn't stop here unless you tell the conductor that you want to get off. Metra Electric Line has this sort of system on lot's of it's South Side stations. The key difference is, if you want to get on the train at a Metra Electric flag station, all you have to do is be visible. But if you want to get on the train at a South Shore Line station, you have to press a button to activate the blinking light right that hangs right above the track.
I've been wondering why that was the case for quite a while. During my trip to Beverly Shores, I got my answer. See, when Metra Electric train approaches a flag stop, it slows down. But when South Shore Line train approaches a flag stop, it zooms past the station at full speed.
I guess at the end, it all comes down to distance. Metra Electric flag stops are spaced pretty close together, while Beverly Shores station, for example, is miles away from the nearest station in both directions.
Anyway, having looked the station, I decided to explore Beverly Shores itself.
As I mentioned before, Beverly Shores started out as a vacation village. It's developers hoped that it would become a very huge, very popular resort. Unfortunately for them, Beverly Shores opened a few months after the Great Depression began, when people weren't exactly in the mood for new luxuries. The developers tried all sorts of gimmicks to lure people in. To their credit, it worked... but only to a point. Beverly Shores got a decent crowd of vacationers, but it was still below their expectations.
More than anything, Beverly Shores reminds me of a Russian style village, in the sense that it's relatively small, almost completely surrounded by forests and far removed from big grocery stores, restaurants, theaters and other aspects of city living. Russians (and many other ex-Soviet nationalities) have a decades-old tradition of taking the electrichka to a small village, rent a small house and stay there for a few weeks. I think I've seen some American book describe it as a "dacha lifestyle."
In fact, one of the first things I saw when I left the station was a food store. And not just any food store, but a kind of food-supplies-and-other-random-stuff store Russian vacationers have to rely on to buy. pretty much everything. They were often located hundreds of meters, if not kilometers, from the village proper. Going on supply runs (well, walks) is a quintessential part of the Russian vacation tradition. If it weren't for all the English language signs and American brands, I would have easily believed that I was somehow teleported to some village in the northern Leningradskaya District.
After stopping by the store, I headed north, where most Beverly Shore homes were. I soon noticed an administrative building, which doubled as a police station and a fire station. At first, I thought it was a little silly, but then I realized that Beverly Shores only has several hundred residents. It's not like they need that much personal to keep things in order.
These days, most of the southern Beverly is abandoned. There are a few houses, but, for them most part, it's just forest. In many places, it's hard to tell where the forest ends and the village begins.
I think this swamp might have been a lake back when Beverly Shores was first established, but I am not sure. It's located right next to Beverly Shores' current southern border.
Almost as soon as I passed the swamp, I started seeing houses. They were definitely bigger then anything you'd find at Russian villages (unless you count all the big dachi the wealthy Russians have been building since the mid 90s)
The fallout from the collapse of the real estate bubble didn't escape Beverly Shores. For example, I passed what I thought was a neat house:
Only to see a "for sale" sign right next to the driveway:
About twenty minutes after I left the station, I made it to the beach. It was located at the foot of a chain of dunes that lined the entire shore.
A sign by the stairs warned of dangerous currents.
As I set stepped onto the beach, I beheld an amazing sight. The evening sun broke through heavy clouds, creating a magnificent interplay of colors. I tried to capture it all on camera, but, in my opinion, even my best shots pale in comparison to the real thing.
According to an artist I talked to at the Summer of Art event, you can't get a decent shot of Chicago from Beverly Shores unless the weather is perfectly clear and you have a decent zoom and a tripod. Given that I had none of those things, I am happy with what little I was able to get.
I also got a shot of Michigan City
And industry near Gary
I left the beach and headed west along the shore. From what I gathered, lots of wealthy vacationers built their summer homes here back in the early 2000s.
I also saw a wind turbine. No idea what that's about.
But the most interesting part of my visit to Beverly Shores was my brief stop near the Century of Progress buildings. They were originally built in 1933 for that year's Century of Progress Houses of Tomorrow exposition. The idea was to build the houses of the future that most people would actually be able to live in. Five of the houses were moved to Beverly Shores back in 1939 in order to attract visitors. Since then, each house passed though several owners, most of whom had trouble maintaining it.
Today, the National Park Authority, Indiana Dune National Lakeshore Park administration and local governments teamed up with the buildings' owners to renovate them and restore them to original condition - at least on the outside. The owners get a lot more leeway on the interiors. Most houses are still being repaired as of this writing.
The House of Tomorrow is the most futuristic one of all. It was pretty much the embodiment of what people of the 1930s thought we would live like. The house included hot new technologies like the air conditioner and a dish washer. And, because people in the 1930s thought we would all be flying small private planes in the future, the house originally came with an airplane hanger. It also had windows on every side, which proved to be it's undoing, since the house got so hot the air conditioner overloaded and died. They had to modify the design to let people open windows.
Next, we have the Cypress log cabin. Basically, it's a log cabin made entirely of cypress. It's builders argued that this was going to be the Next Big Building Material. While cypress does have some useful properties, it never caught on.
Then, we have the Florida Tropical House. The high concept behind this one is that it's supposed to seamlessly integrate indoor and outdoor environments, seamlessly transitioning between the two. It had one major flaw - it was designed for Florida climate, which meant that the chillier Indiana climate battered the hell out of it.
Next to it, we have the Wieboldt-Rostone House. It was meant to show rodstone, an experimental building material made of limestone, shale and alkali. It was billed as a house that would never need repairs. As it turned out, the material lasted a few months before it started cracking. By 1950s, the house was pretty much falling to pieces. The owners tried to replace rodstone with another experimental material, but that didn't work well on the long run, either. Right now, the restorers are trying to incorporate rodstone again. I can't even begin to guess what the hell they are thinking.
Finally, we have the Armco-Ferro House. It was built out of several steel plates that were bolted together. As far as long-term usage goes, this one was the most successful, and it's the only house that could be realistically mass-produced all over America, which earned it a lot of kudos back in the day. In spite of that, the design didn't catch on, though the idea universal, easy to assemble design that can be adopted anywhere helped to inspire much of the post World War II housing.
At this point, I had fifty minutes until my train back to Chicago. I figured I would probably be able to make it back in half an hour, but I decided not to take any chances, so I walked back as briskly as I could.
I made it there about twenty five minutes before the train's scheduled arrival.
Soon, an elderly couple biked up to the station. They came from Town of Pines, a small nearby village. I warned them that NICTD doesn't accept bikes, but they told me that they weren't taking the train - they just liked visiting the station. We struck up a conversation, chatting about Indiana, Chicago and Russia (because once people find out I am Russians, they always ask questions). Everything was going pleasantly until the old man suddenly declared:
"You know why I like Russia? They don't have any darkies there."
To say that I was stunned doesn't begin to cover just how shocked I felt. This is the first time I've ever heard any American express anything so outright racist in a casual conversation. And in this day and age... I glanced at his wife, hoping that she would scold him or something, but she readily agreed.
I knew that saying that racism was wrong wasn't going to get me anywhere, but I couldn't leave something like that unanswered. So I explained that, technically speaking, they were wrong. During the Cold War, Soviet government supported many African countries. Students from African nations attended our universities, there were all sorts of cultural events... As the result, many major cities have a very small population of half-African, half-Russian kids and (to the lesser extent) African citizens that took on Soviet (and later Russian) citizenship. The elderly couple went on to complain about African-Americans and how they are violent and uneducated. I pointed out that Barack Obama was pretty well educated, and so was his wife. The couple
"You like Obama?" the old man said.
"Yes, I do."
He signed. I could almost hear him thinking 'oh, he's one of those poor brainwashed idiots.' His wife quickly steered the conversation towards Russian surnames and I tried my best to pretend nothing happened.
When I got on, I was very relieved to see that almost a third of the passengers were black. Sanity restored.
I pretty much slept most of the way back, occasionally waking up to catch the last rays of the sun before the sky became completely dark. I was very tired, but happy that I made the trip. Not everything turned out quite the way I expected, but in the end, it made things interesting, so I can't complain.
I leave this post with the last image I took at Beverly Shores and a few shots on the sun setting over Indiana.
