Calumet Park Beach house: What's That Building?
WBEZ’s fourth annual summer series of “What’s That Building?” focuses on structures on the beaches of the South Side. We’ll do North Side beaches in summer 2027 but started with the South Side because there are more layers of architecture and history, in part because fewer of the beaches are on latter-day lakefill. These South Side beaches also have more to tell about Chicago’s history of segregation.
The first stop on the tour is Calumet Park, the southernmost tip of Chicago’s 22-mile lakefront. It’s so close to Indiana, in fact, that from the most southern of Calumet Park’s three beaches, the crescent-shaped cove at 100th Street, you wouldn’t have to be a strong swimmer to cross the state line. The Indiana border is about 800 feet (0.15 of a mile) out in the water and even closer to the 98th Street beach, also in this park. From there, the state line is about 100 feet away in the water.
Calumet Park is different from the better known lakefront parks, such as Jackson Park, in that visitors arrive by winding through the neighborhood. But it was designed by the Olmsted Brothers in the tradition of Jackson Park.
There’s a stately cultural center, formerly known as the fieldhouse, but our spotlight is on the park’s beach building. It’s a zippy memento of the mid-20th century, with triple arches on the concrete entry canopy, metal pipe hand rails railings, a broad promenade reaching toward the lake and a circular pop-up pilot area above the main roof.
The aerial view shows the footprint of the building and approaching sidewalks is a boat shape — two pointed ends on a long body resembling a kayak, with a circle inscribed over it.
It’s a sharp 1962 design, likely drawn up by an uncredited Chicago Park District staff architect. It was built by the Artistic Stone Company for $213,000, the equivalent of $2.3 million today.
There appears to have been a building here before this one, since the 1910s. An old undated photo shows a classical building but little more. Julia Bachrach, an architectural historian and former historian for the Chicago Park District, and Johanna Russ at the Chicago Public Library dug through records at our behest, and they believe the structure was built around 1917 and demolished for this one.
If true, that means there was a beach house at least five years before the big fieldhouse.
This may be because, according to a landmarking document, after the city’s South Park Commission began acquiring land in the 1880s and designated this site a park in 1905, the park grew by several larger acquisitions. Only the beach would have been in use in those earliest years.
There’s no record of why or when the first was demolished and this built, but it seems likely that by the early 1960s, the beach was so crowded it was beyond the capacity intended for a smaller park.
The building clearly needs some love now; much of the paint is peeling. But when it opened, in an era of drive-up restaurants and drive-in movies, it must have seemed very hip and modern. And we’ve come back around to appreciating its style.
Not too long ago, in 2019 and 2020, it looked like this building might be lost because of the rising level of Lake Michigan. The natural cycle of the lake was at a high at that time, causing a reported $25 million in damage to lakefront and lakefront parks. A park district drone video from summer 2019 shows water at the rim of the promenade. There’s more beach now, as Lake Michigan is about four feet lower.
From this beach, the steel mills and industrial plants of northwestern Indiana dominate the view. It’s a reminder this beach is intertwined with Southeast Chicago’s industrial history.
For one thing, the beach and much of the park was built on lakefill, some of which is made from the slag from those nearby steel mills. That’s not quite as romantic a story as Grant Park being built on lakefill that includes rubble from the Great Chicago Fire.
Historically, refuse from the mills wasn’t only underfoot. For a few years in the 1940s, Calumet Parks’ beaches were closed because of dust and popcorn-sized steel slag landing on the beach and in the water.
Even in 1965, after this beach house was built, Calumet Park and two Indiana towns, Hammond and Whiting, had the most polluted beaches in the region. In 1966, The Chicago Tribune reported the beach had a terrible odor and people would come out of the water covered in a light slime. Yet there are photos from the early 1960s of this beach being very crowded on a summer day.
From the early days, the surrounding neighborhood population was largely steelworkers and other industrial workers, Eastern European followed by Mexican followed by African American. By the 1960s, while Chicago’s beaches weren’t officially segregated, many Black people got the message from other groups that they weren’t welcome on the beach.
To assert their right to share a public space, on June 23, 1963, 19 Black high school and college students staged a 90-minute wade-in on this beach. It was a serious event, but there’s a dash of humor in the Chicago Tribune’s coverage, which noted that “20 policemen, some in bathing suits, were present.”
Three years later, in June 1966, a white crowd beat up two Puerto Rican beachgoers, and a week later another white group burned a cross on the beach and set fire to “a car which they thought belonged to a civil rights group protesting nearby,” the Tribune reported.
Six decades later, Calumet Park’s beaches are part of a park district effort to instill equity on the city’s beaches, one aspect being to bring in restaurants and other amenities standard on North Side beaches.
Stephanie Hatch, from the firm that manages the park district’s beach concessions, UCG Associates, said it’s not only part of enhancing people’s enjoyment of Chicago’s beaches. Entrepreneurs find the contracts for beach spaces a good way to launch and boost a small business, because there’s built-in foot traffic during a busy, fun time of year.
Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and In the Loop’s “What’s That Building?” contributor.
K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for In the Loop’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago.
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