The Pine Village Gym In Pine Village, Indiana

I saw a story on this old gym that was going to be torn down, and I knew that I needed to get out and photograph it. As it turns out I finally made it out there just before it came down. You don’t have to research this building too much to see when it was built. The look of the gym also told me that it was a WPA building made as the country was trying to dig out of the Great Depression. In this time frame a lot of what we have come to take for granted was built as part of the New Deal to get the country back on its feat. These buildings that I have seen all have a similar look to them. This building was a beautiful piece of history that just couldn’t be saved. In 1972 the school went on a historic basketball run, and by the next year the team was no more as the school was combined into Seeger. The gym was still being used after the high school left it, but the cost to keep the gym up was too much for the small town to bear. The day after I made photos outside of the gym it was torn down. I would have loved to have seen the inside of this building before the demo started. The outside of the stadium reminded me a bit of the old Loeb Stadium which was built in the same year.

An Inspirational Gym

Photographing this gym and then seeing photos of the rubble as it was torn down shortly after is what spurred me on to start making more photos like this. There is so much around us that has seen so much over time that I wanted to document. That led me to photographing buildings and trying to learn a little more about them, and ultimately to this post once a week where I learn about a building in my area that I knew little to nothing about previously. At some point I may run out of subjects, but that just means that I will have to find a new area to roam and learn about. I like this idea as it puts history and photography together which are two of my favorite things. I am sad that this building had to come down, but I am happy with the project that it inspired.