By the time Maher received this commission, his son Philip had joined his practice following his deployment in the First World War and his formal architectural education at the University of Michigan. Within a year of this building’s design in 1921, Philip was an official partner in the firm of George W. Maher & Son.

This design is one of two Gary commissions the Mahers received in 1921 – Marquette Park’s Bathing Beach pavilion was the other. While we aren’t sure which commission came first or if they received them at the same time, this design was actually one of the last of theirs in the city that would be built – for reasons unknown to us, it wasn’t constructed until 1926.

The first drawings presented for this building were much more ambitious in style and scale – one of those renderings, shown in photo #7, is a reworking of a previous Maher design for a golf course clubhouse in the North Shore community of Kenilworth from 1917. The renderings in photos #8 and #9 are even grander.

Overall, this building is in the Tudor Revival style, shown in its construction of dark brick, the peaked roof covered in slate tiles (many of the original tiles were later removed, asphalt shingles are now in their place), and vertical timbers separated by bands of stucco in the prominent front-facing gables. It also features many hallmarks of Maher’s designs: overall, the structure is broad and maintains a lower profile, its facade is perfectly symmetrical, with 5 segmental arches used over window and door openings, and the walls beneath the forward-facing gables are canted – Maher used similar canted walls in many of his residential designs.

Beyond the replacement of much of its original slate-covered roof, a handful of other changes have been made over the years. The building originally featured a prominent cupola in the center of its roofline (you can see where it used to sit); the large arched window openings on either end of its facade have been cinder blocked in, along with many other original window and door openings; the original balusters on the porch have been removed; the large planters on the porch were added later; and the main entry doorway has been reworked. In the rear of the building, a large awning was added much later, likely to cover a seating area.

Inside, the building originally contained locker rooms, showers, restrooms, a restaurant, and a golf shop. It’s undergone many changes over the years, with a drastic reworking of those interior spaces.

Although Maher is more commonly associated with his contributions to what would become known as the Prairie School of architecture, this melding of modern refinement with nods to old world styles is something he did throughout his career – even while he openly and passionately advocated for the development of an indigenous American architectural movement early in his career, and prided himself on that practice. While some of this can be attributed to his own artistic inclinations, he also bent to the will of his clients more-so than some of his more well-known contemporaries and predecessors, like Wright and Louis Sullivan. Because of the location of this commission – a golf course – and the fact that its design was likely at the direction of a handful of of people, it’s not surprising that a revivalist style popular in the 1920s was chosen.