Crown Point, Indiana

Northwestern Indiana is a unique part of the state as much economically and demographically as it is naturally.  As if human culture were trying to stick to natural drainage patterns and ecotones, heavily industrialized Lake and Porter counties contrast with the rest of the agrarian state.  Even the other large cities such as Fort Wayne and Indianapolis do not feature manufacturing and refining as their main events.  Gary, on the other hand, has industry for its lifeblood.

Those blurry bits on the horizon are huge refineries and processing mills that surround the undeveloped shoreline of the Dunes national and state parks.

Head south enough, even within the two south shore counties, and one can find "Indiana proper" slowly emerging, along with a domestic and civic architecture one would expect to find from the true Midwest.   I covered what one could typically find in a Midwestern city center back on a post which featured a few downtown shots of Independence, Missouri .  Picture the downtown from "Back to the Future" (despite it being supposedly set somewhere further west) and you get your classic Midwestern townscape, complete with a central government building, a movie theater, and a bunch of shops set around the main square.  As noted in the earlier post, the civic planning is based on a strong democratic basis of a culture that focuses on interdependent family and small town ties, along with less of a focus on commercialism and more of one on public gatherings.  Still, this is the "cultural ecotone" of northwest Indiana, and the landscape here is just a little bit different.  Case in point: Crown Point.  The pictures, I think, can speak for themselves.

The courthouse.  John Dillinger escaped from here!