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Description: Closed hotel, once a Holiday Inn
Location: 3030 East Dunes Highway at the
entrance to I-90 on the east side
of Gary, Indiana
Condition: Partially Demolished
Photographed: April, 2001 - updated August, 2001
As a child, I can remember with excitement as the day’s long car ride was ending and we pulled up in
front of our home for the evening - most often a Holiday Inn. This particular success story could only happen in America.
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Locations of photos.
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The early days of car travel were rough. The last thing a dirty, road-weary traveler wanted to do was
trudge through the lobby of a fancy hotel that catered to the railroad passenger - so they often just pulled off to the side of the road and slept under the stars. Later these “auto gypsies” started
to become a menace - they would help themselves to crops along the roadways and litter - so some enterprising communities set up “auto parks”, hoping to cash in on the needs of the traveler and
centralize them in a place away from the city center. This inevitably led to groups of people that would live “permanently” in these camps, drawn to the freedom the road had to offer. Town councils
were then forced to charge a nominal fee to discourage this behavior.
Some enterprising farmers handy with an ax figured out they could build simple
log cabins and offer better shelter than the canvas cover on the patron’s car.
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This is an actual postcard of the Gary Holiday Inn shortly after it opened.
(Click for a larger picture)
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Thousands of “hotel courts” - small shacks, later small houses complete with garages - sprung up all over the country
. Often these independent operators would band together in “chains”, hoping to chain the traveler from one court to another as the went along their way. Eventually these individual cabins gave
way to long buildings with multiple rooms, which were cheaper to build. The evolution to standardized hotel rooms was on the way.
It was in this environment that Kemmons Wilson made a journey to Washington, DC
in 1951. Appalled by the condition of some of the places he stayed, he came home determined that what was needed was simple, clean, standardized lodging -
rooms that a family knew in advance would have the same layout and meet the same high quality standards no matter where they went. He went home to Memphis,
Tennessee and had plans drawn up for just such a prototype hotel. Obviously
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 A lot has changed in almost 50 years: a picture from the same spot as was taken in the postcard.
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having just watched a classic Bing Crosby movie, the draftsman scrolled a cursive “Holiday Inn” on the drawing,
and without too much debate, an American icon was born.
Kemmons’ idea proved pretty popular, because by 1960 there were over 100 Holiday Inns in operation around the
country, and by 1970 there were over 175,000 rooms available in the Holiday Inn system. This hotel on the east side of Gary is more than likely one of the locations built during that expansion in the late 1960s - it is
true to the standard design of that era. There is a large lobby that also housed a family restaurant - so that the traveler could be sure of what they were eating. Most hotels also had an
outdoor pool for family recreation - though in northern climates that pool sometimes was indoors.
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 The northwest corner of the hotel.
(The back side from the road)
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This facility sits on a very busy stretch of road called the “Dunes Highway” that is also US Highway 12 and
20 between Portage and Gary, Indiana. It was once was the major road around the southern tip of Lake Michigan for travelers going from Detroit to Chicago, and even when the Indiana Toll Road was
completed (I-90), literature lists this hotel as “Convenient to the ‘Gary East’ exit from the Indiana Toll Road”. However, when I-65 was completed, the reconfiguration of the interchange meant
that this building was hidden from most traffic, and no evident exit from the freeway would lead you there. That probably spelled eventual doom for the hotel.
A large fence surrounds the property, broken down in several places. The guest
rooms were in a two-story L-shaped building, with ground-floor rooms opening directly into the parking lot that surrounds the building, and second-floor
rooms accessible from an open walkway reached via staircases at each end. The parking lot is overgrown.
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 Looking into the former guest rooms from the north side parking lot. All of the metal and glass facade is missing, as are all of the furnishings.
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Most interesting is that all of the facade of the guest room section is missing, spare some metal framing on the
second floor only and some wood framing on the pool-facing rooms. This framing is braced in places - especially in the middle of what once framed the doorway to each room. This is also typical
design - the fronts of each room were constructed of panels - some solid, some glass, some door assemblies. There is little glass on the ground in front of these rooms, so in this part of town it
is likely that the fronts were removed to discourage squatters or homeless, or as part of an ill-fated renovation attempt. It appears as if an equal number of rooms faced outward around the parking lot area as faced into the
courtyard. Many of these inner-outer sets had pass doors between them to allow them to be opened up into “suites”.
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 Looking into a former guest room from the outside. All of the metal and glass facade is missing,
as is all of the furnishings.
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Because the fronts are missing, you can see directly through the rooms and into what once housed the bathroom for each
room. The wallpaper in these rooms is a hideous yellow, white and pea-green striped pattern. All of the carpeting in the guest rooms is gone - stripped to the bare concrete floor. There are no
fixtures, mirrors or furniture, save one room on the ground floor that holds a bunch of old dressers that served better as luggage stands than as a place to actually put clothing. Since the rooms
appear to be carefully cleaned out, it is unlikely that vandals ravaged the property, and much more likely that the parts were sold at auction. The walls are constructed of cinder blocks and the
floors are poured concrete, which is why they have lasted, even exposed to the harsh winters of northern Indiana.
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 The boarded up lobby entrance.
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The hotel was most recently called the “Interstate Motor Inn”, and a sign on the site indicates that it was up for
auction in 1997 - apparently with little success. A search through the archives of the Gary Post-Tribune shows that this was a frequent trouble spot for the Gary police in the early to mid-1990s, with
at least one murder occuring here and an abduction of a teenager. There are staircases at the ends of each of the guest room buildings that have wooden walls built up to block access to the
second floor back side of the building - no doubt this was the first section to close and management didn’t want people wandering back there.
The lobby building’s front door and windows are covered with boards - but they
are the only ones that are that way - the rest of the glass and doors are missing. There is a large, mid-1970s era satellite dish out front - no doubt
for the free HBO. To the left of the front door is a brick wall that shielded the courtyard from the road in front, and then the end of the L-shaped guest
room building begins. The awning over the driveway is a zig-zag shape, and all of the trim on the building is still painted Holiday Inn green, spare some odd bright blue trim on the main building.
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 Looking into the former lounge.
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To the right of the front door, the boards that once covered the windows into the lounge are missing and the
glass has been smashed out. Thus one can stand in the front driveway and take pictures right into this room. The room is decorated in typical 1970’s style, with dark wood and some dark overstuffed
chairs clustered in the back. The carpet is a tacky red and black plaid pattern, which suggest this might have had a Scottish theme - or just a really bad decorator. There are Christmas
garlands still hanging from the bar, though all of the liquor is long gone. The room has a door near the bar which opens up into a small hallway, across which is a window into the drink
preparation area for the main dining room.
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 Hallway from the front.
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To the left of the lounge - between it and the front door - is a hallway that opened up to the
front drive, probably though a missing emergency fire door. The hallway runs the length of the building, and you can see the original restaurant in the back. On the left side are some empty
storage rooms, and on the right is the lounge.
Further down the hall is a small empty room - most likely a meeting room or private dining room, since it is the right size and close to the
kitchen. The walls are wood paneling that was later covered by thick wallpaper. Serious water damage appears at the bottom of the walls, since this hall has been open to the elements for some
time. The ceiling is covered with acoustical tiles, some of which have dislodged and smashed to the floor, most likely when their glue was softened by the humidity on a hot summer day. One
can imagine guests, perhaps fresh from a wedding reception or family reunion, walking down this hall searching for a drink in the bar or a bite to eat.
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 The restaurant. Cashier in the back, drink preparation area on the left, kitchen on the left (out of
picture). Taken while standing in the courtyard though a now missing picture window.
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I walked around behind the lobby building into the L-shaped courtyard formed
between it and the also L-shaped guest room building. The back was a large open room which once was lined floor to ceiling with glass windows, now smashed to
the ground. This large room was the main restaurant - the opening to which was the long hallway that stretched from the front emergency exit. There is a
cashier counter by the doorway, and four other openings: to the small private dining room/meeting room, another to an area for preparing drinks, another to a
small hallway which was lined with offices, and to the main tiled kitchen. The drink preparation area has a window into the bar with a curtain over it, most
likely for retrieving alcoholic beverages while getting around Indiana’s very strict laws about minors not even being able to see a bar before they are 21.
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 The courtyard and swimming pool from the restaurant.
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The carpeting is still here, red but stained with missing ceiling material and pieces of the vertical blinds which
could once close off the substantial picture windows. The walls are dark wood paneling. No doubt this was once a very pleasant place to eat, with great views of what was once a neatly trimmed
courtyard and a swimming pool filled with kids splashing away the summertime. I can remember eating some “Fish and Chips” (frozen fish sticks and fries) in a room much like this one on a vacation
we took to Florida, anxiously awaiting the chance to jump in the pool. Unfortunately, the pool at this location is probably not fit for swimming, having collected some of the junk from the
closed hotel and several seasons of rainwater and melting snow.
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This mid-1960s postcard image from the Tupelo, MS Holiday Inn indicates what
this area might have looked like in its prime.
Note the exact same railings exist on this hotel as the ones in Gary, and the overall hotel follows a similar design, indicating they may have been built around the same time.
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By the mid-1970s the Holiday Inn chain was in trouble. Intense pressure in the mid-priced hotel market, coupled with
the gas shortage that curtailed auto travel, and the fact that the once modern hotels were now becoming dated caused the brand to begin to decline. In the mid-1980s, the chain underwent a
rebirth - jettisoning the old flashy signs for new, sedate ones, and spending millions on refurbishing properties and building new ones. They also launched the Crowne Plaza brand, an upscale
offering targeted to business travelers. In 1990, Kemmons Wilson sold Holiday Inns of America to Bass, PLC (the British makers of Bass Ale), who now operate it as a unit of Bass Hotels. Simultaneously they launched a new brand
, Holiday Inn Express, a low-priced concept targeted at the very same market Kemmons Wilson originally tapped - the interstate traveler.
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This mysterious building is filled with old tires.
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One other note: Immediately to the east of the property is a large, weed-infested parking lot with this
mysterious building in the middle. The building appears to be some sort of office or concession stand, which is now filled with old tires. On the side of the building are a series of power
switches. I suspect this was a truck parking lot, with power outlets that once ran out to the various positions throughout the lot.
Kemmons died on February 12, 2003 at the age of 90.
Motel Americana: Holiday Inn 
Kemmons Wilson Companies
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