Beverly Shores — Century-of-Progress Architecture, a Chicago Commuter Rail Stop, and Almost No Room Left to Build

What Actually Makes Beverly Shores Different

Beverly Shores began as a real estate promotion. Chicago developer Frederick H. Bartlett bought roughly 3,000 acres of Lake Michigan lakefront in May 1927 and platted it into fifty-foot lots; in 1933 he sold his entire northwest Indiana holdings to his younger brother, Robert Bartlett, who named the development after his daughter and built out the infrastructure that still partly defines the town today -- roads, a school, an eighteen-hole championship golf course with clubhouse, a seasonal hotel with botanic gardens, a beachfront casino, a riding academy, and a theater. The town was formally incorporated under Indiana law on January 1, 1947. What makes Beverly Shores different from a typical planned lakefront subdivision is what Robert Bartlett did next: in late winter 1935, he purchased architecturally significant model homes from Chicago's 1933-34 "A Century of Progress" World's Fair and had them moved here by barge, rolled off onto telephone poles laid across a heavy timber crib built out into the lake, then raised in stages up to the level of what is now Lake Front Drive.

Five of those homes survive today as a genuinely rare piece of architectural history: the House of Tomorrow (architect George Fred Keck, a twelve-sided glass-walled house that included its own attached airplane hangar), the Florida Tropical House (architect Robert Law Weed, a pink Art Deco showpiece built to promote Florida living), the Armco-Ferro House (an enameled-steel-panel house sponsored by the American Rolling Mill Company and Ferro Enamel Corporation to demonstrate porcelain-enamel steel construction), the Wieboldt-Rostone House (sponsored by the Wieboldt's department store chain and clad in Rostone, a cast synthetic-stone product), and the Cypress Log Cabin (architect Murray D. Hetherington, a traditional log structure included deliberately as a contrast to the ultra-modern designs around it). All five sit at 208 through 215 Lake Front Drive and were listed together on the National Register of Historic Places on June 30, 1986, as the Beverly Shores-Century of Progress Architectural District. This page does not treat that history as background color -- it's covered in real depth on the Buying Process, Real Cost, and What Nobody Tells You pages, because the ownership structure behind these five homes is fundamentally different from anything else on this site.

When the National Park Service acquired the surrounding land in 1966 as part of what was then Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (redesignated Indiana Dunes National Park on February 15, 2019, the country's 61st national park), the five Century of Progress homes and the land under them became federal property. The Park Service leases the district to Indiana Landmarks, the statewide historic preservation nonprofit, which in turn subleases individual homes to private tenants under long-term agreements carrying protective covenants that require restoration and preservation-grade maintenance. One example lease length this research found, cited for the Florida Tropical House, ran 52 years -- though this page does not treat that figure as a fixed term applying to all five houses, since lease lengths and terms may vary by property and by when a given sublease was signed. Because the underlying land is federal, no conventional mortgage is available against it; a buyer of one of these leasehold interests pays cash. A secondary source described the arrangement as meaning no property tax is owed on the home -- this page states that claim honestly as unconfirmed rather than settled fact, since it wasn't independently verified against the Porter County Assessor's office or Indiana Landmarks' own lease documentation, and federal-land tax exemption and a leasehold's own possible tax treatment are not automatically the same question. Anyone seriously considering one of these five specific homes should get that answer in writing from Indiana Landmarks and the County Assessor before assuming either way.

Beyond those five houses, Beverly Shores is a genuinely small, park-adjacent town. The 2020 Census recorded 599 year-round residents, and demographic aggregator data (not an official Census release, treated here as directional) puts the median age around 65.6 and roughly 30% of the town's housing stock -- an estimated 149 of 498 homes -- in seasonal or occasional use, meaning this is a real mix of full-time and part-time residents rather than a purely seasonal resort town, consistent with a place that also has a genuine commuter rail option. That commuter option is real: Beverly Shores has its own South Shore Line station, a flag stop run by the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District from a 1926 Spanish Colonial Revival depot (Beverly Shores' station building, not a generic modern platform) listed on the National Register of Historic Places since July 19, 1989, connecting directly to Millennium Station in downtown Chicago roughly 36 miles away. The town's developed area also sits directly against Indiana Dunes National Park itself -- the Great Marsh Trail's main parking area sits on S. Broadway directly across from Beverly Shores Town Hall, and the Century of Progress district's own street, Lake Front Drive, runs through park land -- a degree of park-adjacency this page describes honestly without a specific boundary-percentage figure this research could independently confirm.

Finally, a genuine freshwater reframe this page states plainly: the Great Lakes have never recorded a hurricane, and Beverly Shores carries none of that risk. In its place sit real, documented hazards worth taking seriously -- Lake Michigan's dramatic 2013-2020 water-level swing, which produced near-record highs by 2019-2020 and caused real, NPS-documented erosion at Central Avenue Beach and the Portage Lakefront elsewhere within Indiana Dunes National Park (this page found, but could not fully access, an NPS release specifically addressing Lake Front Drive and park-property protection work with the Town itself); a real tornado and severe-thunderstorm exposure tied to Porter County's position within the National Weather Service Chicago office's coverage area, a meaningfully more storm-exposed position than Great Lakes markets further north; and lake-effect snow off Lake Michigan in winter. Where this page could not verify a specific current figure -- a single reliable median home price (multiple 2025-2026 sources disagree sharply, from roughly $521,750 to $1.28 million depending on methodology and exactly which properties are counted), a Beverly-Shores-specific erosion rate, or the exact current tax treatment of a Century of Progress leasehold -- it says so rather than inventing a number.