1830 Indianapolis Boulevard

Jeff Vrabel

First, to get this out of the way, this history still has a lot of holes. In researching the origin story of a small, reasonably nondescript building on a once-dominant thoroughfare in northwest Indiana, you pretty quickly realize that an overabundance of information will not be one of your problems. You’re relying on an awful lot of ancient stuff: questionably scanned newspapers, ads from 1923, scanned microfilm copies of some water-damaged city directories — and that’s just the unknowable percentage of stuff that’s been digitized. You’re also digging through it on the internet, so what you end up with is a weird mix of ancient hard copies, surviving records in government buildings, and whatever faith you can have in the AI that scans, organizes, and searches it all.

That said, you also get lucky on a number of fronts. You run into folks from groups like the Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society, who help fill in gaps and dig into their non-digitized archives. You get help from folks at the Indiana State Library and the cities of Whiting and Hammond. And you take advantage of the work that’s been done by strangers’ families on Ancestry, which provide connective tissue for things you wouldn’t have thought of.

So what follows here is the hopefully organized result of internet research, ChatGPT answers (for what those are worth), Lake County Courthouse cratedigging, and a good deal of conjecture. And though we’ve put together more of a timeline than we had before, we’re still missing key points, including the question that sort of kicked off this whole endeavor: Wait, did Grandma and Grandpa’s house used to be a funeral home? (1)