The Beverly Shores Depot Museum & Art Gallery kicks off its spring/summer season with a few firsts: The museum and gallery will open a month earlier than usual, in April, and our featured artist is, for the first time, a student.
The portraits of Marquette High School senior Lydia Lemmons stood out to the Depot’s new curator, Meg Bero. “The variety of emotions expressed as well as the images she creates to surround them are very creative, particularly for a young artist,” Bero says.
“You often see students copying magazine images. They may have the skill to do so perfectly, but the composition has already been created. Lydia imagines these faces and their expressions and creates the composition, choosing colors and unique backgrounds, which complement and accentuate the expressions.”
Held simultaneously with Lemmons’ artwork is “Celebrating Our Depot,” an exhibit rich with photos of the history, construction and renovation of the historic Beverly Shores Depot. It also features other photos of architect Arthur Gerber’s other train depots that dotted Chicago’s North Shore and the South Shore line in Northwest Indiana. Aside from a building that was a station in Highland Park, Beverly Shores is the only depot remaining.
The Beverly Shores station was built in 1929 in the Spanish Mission style preferred by Frederick H. Bartlett, who developed Beverly Shores.
By 1988, it was headed for demolition, like its sister station at Central Street in Beverly Shores.
Over 10 years, a group of Beverly Shores residents, along with the superintendent of the Indiana Dunes National Park, NIPSCO and Save the Dunes banded together to preserve the building. They obtained a designation for the building on the National Register for Historical places and collected $500,000 for its restoration. The station reopened in July of 1998.
You can find the Beverly Shores Depot at 525 S. Broadway in Beverly Shores. More information can be found here.
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