Gilroy Stadium in Gary, Indiana: A Hidden Tennis Building and Concrete Falling In

I would never have believed this was here. This is the tennis building at Gilroy Stadium in Gary, Indiana, buried in overgrowth next to a football stadium that was built in 1956 and never finished.

The tennis building is the find. It still has books, tapes, CDs, tennis rackets, racket covers and balls, left sitting in a building I don’t think many people know about.

What we found

There’s a ton of books left on the tables. One says October November of 1995. The roof is falling apart and the books are pretty decayed. There are tapes, CDs, some really old tennis rackets and some floppy disks.

Next are the men’s and women’s locker rooms. There are tennis covers, a really decayed TV and the bench where players would tie their shoes. Most of the lockers are empty except one, which holds a really nice case, a bunch of magazines and a ton of rackets that are pretty well preserved. Another locker has a tennis ball. One shower has been locked all these years.

The courts are completely overgrown, and you can see the stadium lights. We can’t even get to some of it. There’s no hole in the fence, and I don’t think anybody has really explored this. The windows have fallen apart, but nobody has known about it for a long time, considering there’s still stuff left in there. The stadium itself is pretty open and there’s not much left in it.

On the football side, one goal post is still standing on each end, which surprised me. The scoreboard is still there too, and it isn’t attached to anything, so I’m not sure whether it folded up. On the press box a graffiti artist painted “It’s just paint” to prove a point, so it’s also kind of called the It’s Just Paint stadium.

Part of the track that went around is still visible, mostly overgrown. The bleachers are a mix. Some have collapsed and some are in great shape.

We crossed a spot where the concrete had fallen in. I put one foot on the wall and the other beside it, and we made it. You can see chunks of cement where the concrete used to be part of the stands. There was no dying allowed.

I found a couple of concession stands where fans would have come for popcorn and soda. Underneath the bleachers I was surprised nobody had crossed over and graffitied. A bathroom or two had nothing in them. One room has a giant hole in the floor.

Then I climbed to the announcer’s booth. It’s falling apart and there’s some mildew or mold. It was fenced off so you couldn’t get in, but somebody had opened the fence. The booth is mostly empty and the view is amazing. Getting on top of it meant sneaking around another fence and skipping a few missing steps, and then I had a view of the baseball diamond and a second scoreboard.

The light tower on that side looks like it collapsed, from lightning or from rusting away. The baseball diamond has dugout areas for teams to prep, and the net was there. The ticket booth sits off by itself and the stairs to it are gone, so I couldn’t check inside.

Why Gilroy Stadium is abandoned

Gilroy Stadium was built to replace Gleason Field, a U.S. Steel facility that had gotten uneven and run down. Gary’s city council approved a $350,000 bond issue on April 5, 1955, for the first 10,000 seat section. Ground was broken on September 19, 1955, and the stadium was completed on June 10, 1956. The cost reached $850,000 by March 1956, and the architects said the early estimates had been too low. The video description puts it at more than $1 million. The project was later tied to corruption, and several politicians were convicted of taking kickbacks.

The site is also a problem. It was built over a city dump that operated from 1930 to 1951, on what had been a sandy swamp. A compilation of newspaper reports says the field sank unevenly and an interior office area collapsed. It lists crime in the area as another reason events stopped, and says the stadium closed in 1975. Events faded by the 1980s, though some festivals and city events continued.

That page is a compilation and not a news article, so treat the details as reported and not confirmed.

There is still a goal post at each end of the field.