Robertsdale’s Athey Hydro Amusement Park
John Hmurovic
April 2025

Windy days in March are not unusual for Whiting-Robertsdale residents, even in 1914. But on March 12 of that year, when people stepped outside there was something very different in the air.

Up in the sky, despite a strong wind, there was an airplane. The pilot was flying low, then taking off in a straight line upwards. He would do loops in the sky and put the plane through all sorts of maneuvers. People on the ground in Whiting-Robertsdale, and even in East Chicago and the far southern end of Hammond, came out of their shops, factories, and homes to look.

In 1914, air mail had not yet started, and passenger planes were still a dream. Everyone knew what airplanes were, but some had never seen one, and even fewer had seen one doing the stunts that this plane was doing.

Why was the pilot putting on a show for the people of Whiting-Robertsdale?

The next day the newspapers explained it. He was letting everyone know that something exciting was coming to their community. Soon, there would be an amusement park built here, and its main draw would be airplanes.

It was to be called the Athey Hydro Amusement Park. Breaking the name down: “Athey” was for Isaac Henry Athey, the man with the idea; “Hydro” was for the fact that this park was going to feature planes that could fly in the air and float on the water; “Amusement Park” was for their plan to have a variety of other fun options within the park.

The Athey Hydro Amusement Park was located on what is now Forsyth Park. Before its arrival, that land was a wooded area, a beautiful spot where people came to enjoy nature, have a picnic, or fish in the adjacent channel, known to everyone then as the Wolf River. The land was owned by the Forsyth family and was leased to I.H. Athey, as Isaac was commonly known.

There was no Water Gardens housing development yet. There were no homes, no Parkview, Caroline, Warwick, or Brown Avenues. There were, however, some important developments on the edges of Athey Hydro Amusement Park. Across the Wolf River, the American Maize Corn Processing plant was already in place along the water’s edge. Along the northern edge there was Indianapolis Boulevard, and on it was a trolly line that connected Whiting-Robertsdale with Chicago. And on the river, adjacent to that trolly line, there was Phil Smidt’s, a restaurant that was rapidly gaining fame for its seafood.

The man who captivated the crowds on March 12, 1914, was Frederick A. Hoover. By this time, he was an experienced and talented pilot. He was also a pioneer in American aviation. He was the holder of pilot license number 100. Like most pilots in those early days, the 26-year-old Hoover was something of a daredevil. His nickname, in fact, was “The Death Defying Aviator.”

He probably got that name in 1912 in Elwood, Indiana. During an aviation exhibition there he was two hundred feet in the air when his plane’s engine failed. The plane plummeted toward the ground. “A cry of horror went up,” among the hundreds who had come to watch the flight. “Many of the women,” a newspaper report of the time said, “faced about so as to avoid seeing the tragic end they anticipated.” The plane crashed into a livestock barn. But Hoover was not hurt. Within a few feet of the barn roof, he leaped out of the plane and onto the barn’s roof. He leapt with enough strength to land far enough away from the damage caused by his plane.    

At Athey Park, Hoover was to head the team of aviators, which included Vangle Ludwig, who had his own death-defying adventures. A crowd of thousands had assembled at the Vernon County Fair in Viroqua, Wisconsin in 1911, to watch his aerial stunts. Just after takeoff the plane experienced problems. Ludwig could not get it to rise, and the plane dragged along the ground and into a parking lot filled with the horses and carriages that the spectators drove to the fairgrounds. The plane struck some of the horses and sent the others into a panic. Forty horses got loose and ran into the crowd. Ludwig’s plane crashed. He was badly bruised but not injured.

The plan at Athey Park was for Hoover, Ludwig and other aviators to put on special exhibitions, doing stunts like loop-the-loops. Parachute jumping exhibitions were also on tap. There would be rides for the adventurous. The cost for a trip over the lake close to the water was five dollars. To encircle the lake for five miles, it would be ten dollars. To Chicago and return over Lake Michigan the fare was set at eighteen dollars. Plus, there would be passenger service to Chicago. Parkgoers could also rise in the sky in a tethered hot-air balloon. For those who wanted to become airplane pilots, there was a school to provide training. Tuition cost three hundred dollars. The dream was to make Athey Park the aviation capital of the Midwest.

Aviation was the central theme, but there was more to Athey Park. There would be a dance hall, a beer garden, and the usual assortment of amusement park rides for all ages. The entrance to the park was at Five Points, on the southwest corner. An archway was built, illuminated with electric lights. The Phil Smidt restaurant was next door on Indianapolis Boulevard, and a trolley stop was just feet away, making Athey Park easily available for anyone from Whiting, Hammond, East Chicago, and Chicago.

Soon after Hoover and Athey presented their plans to Hammond city officials in April, the ground at the north end of the planned park was leveled and a nine-foot-tall fence soon went up to enclose 1,000 acres of land. The plans also called for the use of 2,000 acres of water on the Wolf River and Wolf Lake.     

A German beer garden was opened, and construction was underway on a dance hall at the southern end of the park toward 119th Street. Hammond City Councilman Fred Leverenz, who made a living as a musician, was awarded a contract to furnish all music for the park, including dance and cabaret orchestras, and “a bally-hoo band.” Amusement rides were set up. Hangers were built for the airplanes, and I.H. Athey traveled to the Curtiss Aeroplane Company in Hammondsport, New York to add to the fleet of planes. The momentum was building, but the first in a long string of problems was developing.

The management of the park invited several city and county officials to come on Sunday, May 10, for an exhibition, and maybe to take a seat in a plane and go for a ride. In the days before that, Fred Hoover was back in the skies over Whiting-Robertsdale, dazzling the residents with the figure eights he drew in the sky and other aerial acrobatics. The public was getting excited, and on May 10, the simple little demonstration for city and county officials turned into a massive crowd of 2,000 showing up to watch.

Hoover arrived late that day, and when he got to Athey Park he noticed a few problems with his plane. He decided not to take a chance and fly it. The large crowd expected a show, but nothing happened. “There were no flights, no band, no entertainment – nothing but a crowd of 2,000 people,” the local paper said. The paper blamed Hoover. “If he had been on the ground early and seen to it that his machine was put in condition and the crowd given satisfaction for time and car fare, the day would have been a success.”

The management responded by saying there would be a Grand Opening on Thursday, May 28. “There will be high and low flying exhibitions every hour the opening day,” a newspaper ad stated. “Passengers will be carried at a few feet above the (Wolf River) in our new 80-horsepower machine. There will be dancing, music, a captive balloon, a merry-go-round for the little ones.” Admission was ten cents for adults and five cents for children.  

The opening did not go well. Pilot Vangle Ludwig took to the sky with his hydroplane, and got to one hundred feet above the surface before realizing the pontoon was punctured. He glided to the surface of the Wolf River. He was not injured, but that was the end of the day’s aerial exhibitions. The only things flying around the Athey Hydro Amusement Park that day were swarms of mosquitoes. The next day, I.H. Athey bought a dozen barrels of oil from Standard Oil and saturated the thickets of grass that harbored the bugs. The German beer garden was also not ready by the Grand Opening, and neither was the dance pavilion.

But promises were in abundance. There would be a bigger, grander entranceway to the park at Five Points in 1915, management said, and a more impressive promenade would be constructed, as well. Responding to the unhappiness of the Grand Opening crowd, management said that going forward admission to the park would be free.

In early June business was fantastic at neighboring Phil Smidt’s restaurant.  It had over 1,200 customers and sold a ton of fish over the weekend of June 6-7. Many of those customers took advantage of the free admission at Athey Park. They saw Fred Hoover make two spectacular flights. Plus, there were planes pulling water skiers along the Wolf River, band concerts, and more to entertain them. At the same time, the aviation school had seven students enrolled, including Mable Hornsby, a rare woman in the early days of aviation. Maybe things were looking up.

Unfortunately, the weekend of June 6-7 may have been the park’s high point. A string of bad luck was soon to come. It started the following weekend. On Sunday, June 14, a crowd of more than a thousand gathered. The main event was a hot air balloon ascension. But instead of rising into the sky, the inflated bag caught on fire. The flight was cancelled. No other plane took to the sky that day, and the crowd left disappointed.

The following weekend was to feature a flight by Harry Earle, known as “The Phenomenal Kid.” Just ten days earlier, the young man had never flown a plane. But he was ready to soar to amazing heights and do loop-the-loops after just ten days of learning at the Athey Park school of aviation. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately for “The Phenomenal Kid” the day of his flight was not a good one to be in the sky, or even on the ground. A spectacular storm hit. Within minutes, thousands of beachgoers at the nearby Hammond lakefront were drenched by rain. A pavilion at the lakefront was lifted off the ground and blown ten feet away. Seven men working for a dock company had to fasten ropes to one another to keep from getting swept off into Lake Michigan. Just minutes before this happened, Harry Earle was in the sky, piloting a plane for the eleventh time in his life. He was not far above the Wolf River when he ran into a fifty-mile per hour wind gust, and lost control. His plane went straight down into the river as a crowd of over a thousand watched. The rain quickly followed, and the crowd got as drenched as Earle. “The Phenomenal Kid” was not hurt. As for Athey Park, the rest of the day’s activities were rained out.

Days later, Athey Park suffered another major blow. Its press agent quit. Despite all its early problems, Athey Park had been getting good press coverage, thanks to Thomas Sigler, a newspaper man who understood what was needed to get his client good press. He was also not the kind of person you hire and then didn’t pay. Sigler sued I.H. Athey for $45 in back pay, and he made sure the story about his lawsuit got in the papers.  

 I.H. Athey quickly paid up, but Sigler did not return to the job. The tussle over back pay revealed a bigger problem for Athey Park, its owner was having money problems, and there was no press agent to block the bad publicity.  “Athey Park is Slipping?” was a headline in the Lake County Times in early July. “Thousands have gone there to view the aerial exhibits and taste the advertised joys,” the newspaper wrote. “Mostly they were grievously disappointed. None of the aerial features were pulled off as scheduled. Aside from a few buildings and a lay of the land there is nothing very auspicious about the park, and now the press agent has quit nothing is heard of it. It is also rumored that Alderman Leverenz has resigned as the band leader.”

What followed was nothing but more bad news. On July 5, someone from a passing trolly car on Indianapolis Boulevard flicked a cigar butt onto the roof of the German beer garden. It caught on fire and the German Garden was a total loss. On July 8, Deputy Sheriff Robert Morris put handcuffs on Athey’s airplanes, taking temporary custody of them. He did it because of a complaint filed in court by the Tri-City Electric Company, which claimed Athey owed $1,200 for light fixtures and wiring it installed under contract.

Before the month was over, another storm hit the area. At midnight, a Hammond city alderman was sleeping in his bed when he was hit by a lightning bolt. Another bolt hit the home of John Mihalso on New York Avenue in Whiting, setting the roof on fire. Winds from that same storm lifted the hanger at Athey Park and sent it crashing down. It landed on top of three planes. The planes were damaged, the hanger destroyed.  

To add insult to injury, another storm hit in August. The electric lighted archway at the entrance to the park was ripped down by the wind, which also tore down some of the nine-foot fence that enclosed the park grounds. Concessions and tents were blown into the Wolf River.  

Athey Park was struggling. The promised airplane stunts, the rides that were advertised, the balloon ascensions, never really materialized. The park was losing money, and more lawsuits were filed by creditors.

Zimri A. Cox, a carpenter, sued for nearly $460 that he said was owed to him. Expecting he would get no money from the financially struggling Athey, he also sued landowner Oliver O. Forsyth. The Lundt Roofing Company figured it had no hope of getting money from Athey for the roof it built over the dance hall, so its suit for $200 was solely against Forsyth. With that, Athey Park was finished. The Courts ordered that the planes be sold. By 1916, they also sold the fence, the fixtures, and the buildings to pay off the debts.

We don’t know what became of aviator Ludwig, and whether Harry “The Phenomenal Kid” Earle, ever flew a plane again after crashing into the Wolf River. Frederick “The Death Cheating Aviator” Hoover, one of America’s earliest stunt pilots, kept flying and cheated death until the age of 94.   

I.H. Athey was more of an inventor than a businessman. He invented a weatherstrip for doors that was widely used in the early 20th century. He also invented a device to drop corn seeds into farm fields, a fire escape, and a style of Venetian shades that were popular for years. But his greatest invention was the Athey Truss Wheel. It was used on military tanks, farm tractors, and all sorts of road equipment for decades to follow. He lived most of his life in Chicago and died in 1943 at the age of 80.  

Phil Smidt’s restaurant burned down in the 1940s and moved from that location on Indianapolis Boulevard to a building on Calumet Avenue, just north of Five Points. It stayed in business, serving fish and frog legs until 2007.

Another amusement park was built in that area in the late 1940s. It stood on the land where Phil Smidt’s was located. It was called Merryland, and offered rides for little kids, including an airplane ride that didn’t rise very high above the ground, but was much more reliable than the adult planes that flew at Athey Park. Merryland lasted until the late 1950s. The land on which it stood later became a parking lot for the Unilever plant located across Indianapolis Boulevard.

Most of the land on which the Athey Hydro Amusement Park stood became Forsyth Park, but the site of the German beer garden was probably the land on which Vogel’s Restaurant was constructed. Today, that land is an empty lot next to the entrance of the Unilever parking lot on Indianapolis Boulevard. The archway entrance to Athey Park was probably located on land that became a gas station at the southwest corner of the Five Points intersection, and which today is also an empty lot.   

Robertsdale never became the aviation hub of the Midwest, and Athey Park didn’t last more than a few months as an amusement park. It was a dream that failed to take off, and which vanished into the clouds.