Read time: 6 min.

Ever since I visited the old gym in Gaston a few months ago, I’ve found myself with one singular mission: go to each historic gymnasium in every East-Central Indiana town named after a fossil fuel. I recently completed the quest when I finally got the chance to step inside Gas City’s old gym. 

It was almost exactly a year ago that I visited and wrote about the 1894 Gas City High School. The building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, reopened later that year as Gas City School Apartments. With much of its old classroom space converted into residential units -including six above the gym¹–  I’d have loved to see inside! Unfortunately, scoping out the inside wasn’t in the cards during my impromptu drive-by. 

Enter Brett Yoder, the madman behind Hoosier Gym Journey. Brett’s on a crazy mission to visit every current and former basketball palace in Indiana, and we connected over our shared love of Hoosier history. He’s become a great friend! Brett and I have teamed up on several research projects, and Gas City was one of them. For years, Brett assumed he’d never get the chance to see the old gym from the inside. After plenty of persistence and back-and-forth with the right people, he finally made it happen. As luck would have it, I got to tag along.

Brett and I arrived at the old Gas City gym a little early, so we made our way through the old school’s south entrance. There, a wide stair lead down to the basement as two staircases that framed it led up to the school proper. Originally, the brick basement housed spaces like restrooms and science laboratories around its perimeter and its central rotunda served as a makeshift cafeteria. During the building’s 2004 conversion into apartments, much of the open space was enclosed and transformed into a leasing office.

Our tour guide eventually arrived and, back in the basement, we headed toward the gym. When Gas City High School occupied the building from 1923 to 1948, Tiger fans streamed through the gym’s grand north entrance, where paired doors and windows created the building’s architectural focal point. Students, however, took a different route and entered the gym through a three-story brick connector that linked the Prairie-style addition to the older Richardson Romanesque school. Fittingly, that’s the path we followed as we stepped into the wonderful old gym through the basement.

The old home court of the Gas City Tigers sits slightly below grade. From a hallway break in the bleachers, the gym opens up with a massive stage situated behind the sideline. Apparently, the space was designed with multiple purposes in mind: the stage was set with seating during basketball games and the playing floor was used for audience members during other ceremonies². Doors at the southeast and southwest corners of the gym feature tiny locker rooms on their way to the stage, while stairs lead to offices up above. 

The gym is striking, even with some major changes. The original hardwood court is gone, long replaced by vinyl tile. The glass backboards and scoreboard are modern additions, too. Even so, one breathtaking feature has survived: the gym’s pressed-tin ceiling, which has watched over the building since 1923.

Unfortunately, the celing’s beauty isn’t completely untouched. I believe that converting the classrooms above the gym into apartments required plumbing to be routed in and around the tin. The process left exposed pipes that interrupt what would have otherwise been one of Indiana’s most spectacular historic gym ceilings. It’s a compromise, to be sure, but it’s also the reason the building still stands: if those apartments hadn’t given the old school a new purpose, this remarkable gym might not have survived at all.

I don’t know whether there’s a technical difference between bleachers and stands, but whatever Gas City has feels much more like the latter. The seating climbs steeply along the north side of the gym, broken up every so often by wider wooden landings that act as steps. Including the shallow concrete base, the stands rise nine tiers before reaching a narrow balcony overhead. 

Originally, spectators could reach the balcony by climbing a staircase from the gym lobby, where it connected to the old school on the second floor. There’s also a wonderfully odd ladder that leads up from the top row of the stands. Today, plumbing installed during the apartment conversion blocks part of the space, but Brett managed to squeeze his way up for a closer look. I stayed behind. One glance at the balcony’s remarkably low ceiling was enough to make me wonder how anyone ever fit up there comfortably in the first place.

With that, my quest to visit every historic gym in East-Central Indiana’s fossil-fuel towns came to an end. As I experienced in Gas City, historic preservation is rarely perfect. Sometimes it means accepting vinyl floors instead of hardwood and exposed plumbing instead of pristine details. Even so, I’ll take a building that’s been adapted over one that’s been demolished every time.

As Brett and I were leaving, I noticed a small, triangular cabinet-style door that was unlocked. I had to open it, naturally, and discovered the substructure of the bleachers inside. I wonder what kids used to sneak off and do under there! Maybe I don’t want to know.

Nearly a century after it opened, the old Gas City gym is still serving the community in a different way. That’s a far better ending than so many Indiana school gyms have received, and it was well worth the wait to finally see it for myself! Brett and I had to take a quick tour through the 1894 high school to discover it, and I’ll write about that place soon.

Sources Cited
1 Gas City School Apartments Gets $346,700 Grant (2004, July 28). The Twin City Journal-Reporter. p. 1. 
2 National Register of Historic Places, Gas City High School, Gas City, Grant County, Indiana, National Register # 03001316.