After reading my story this morning, my sister wrote about how she went on an "outing" once and actually saw Al Capone's hideaway in the dunes. She didn't tell anybody about it at the time because she would have gotten in a lot of trouble for wandering around out on the beach. Here is her description:
It was probably about 1967. We walked way down the beach toward Michigan City, so far we could see the docks way off in the distance. It seemed like we could look straight across the lake and see Chicago, instead of looking at it from the side.
The guys may have even known it was there because I think we had been talking about the tales. You could just see a bit of the tile roof from the beach. It was set behind the first row of the dunes. It had obviously been totally abandon for a long time, but it was still beautiful – and kind of spooky. It looked like an Italian palazzo laid out in a square with a big open courtyard in the middle. There were a few remnants of wooden shutter left and a few deteriorating doors. It was two story with columns (in my memory they were marble) facing the courtyard and forming the hallway to all the rooms top and bottom – all the doors opened to the courtyard. The floor of the courtyard was some kind of tile – ceramic or maybe marble. Someone had built a little campfire in the middle of it. Seems like there were remnants of a fountain too. There was evidence that it had plenty of visitors – beer bottles, etc. Everything that was not nailed down was long gone. My imagination just ran wild with how grand it must have been.
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