BP's offices are on the move in Whiting.
The oil giant is acquiring the former Mascot Hall of Fame from the city of Whiting, aiming to move office workers there from the Glass House on Indianapolis Boulevard.
It's not the first major shuffle of office space around the refinery, which Standard Oil first opened in 1889 to refine kerosene for lamps before the cars it fuels today were even widespread. GasBuddy Petroleum Analyst Patrick De Haan said the 136-year-old refinery is considered the oldest refinery still operating in the United States at a time when the average age of a refinery is 55 years old.
When it was still run by Standard Oil of Indiana, before BP bought the company in 1998, the refinery had a nearby research and development center that's now a college.
The refinery had a history of innovation. It's where William Merriam Burton invented a thermal cracking process in 1913 that later evolved into catalytic cracking, a method of using high temperatures and high pressures to crack heavier and less volatile hydrocarbons into lighter molecules that can be blended into gasoline, greatly increasing the yield of gasoline from crude oil. The practice remains widespread at refineries today.
In 1949, Standard Oil built a seven-story research tower at 2400 New York Ave. which has a Whiting address but is actually in Hammond.
The building was designed by Holabird & Root, a longtime Chicago architecture firm that also restored the Louis Comfort Tiffany Art Glass Dome in the Chicago Tiffany Center, built an addition onto Northwestern University School of Law's Rubloff Building downtown and constructed the Student Life Center at East-West University.
Standard Oil moved its R&D to a more modern suburban office park in Naperville in the early 1970s. BP still operates in that campus today though it has shifted many workers to downtown Chicago and sold off some unused buildings.
In 1973, the oil company donated the research center it no longer used to Calumet College of St. Joseph, a spinoff of Calumet College in Rensselaer. Calumet College had previously operated in old storefronts at the intersection of Indianapolis Boulevard and Chicago Avenue in East Chicago. The bookstore was in a diner, the student union was in the old Indiana Bell phone company building, the library was in a Wonder Bread outlet, the chapel was in a house, the theater was in the old water department office and the administration building was in a furniture store.
Mike Dosen, who runs the "East Chicago, Indiana in Photos" Facebook page, attended classes at both campuses and remembered test tubes and old office furniture just sitting around after Calumet College moved into the Standard Oil R&D center. He said it had a more collegial atmosphere than attending classes in old houses and storefronts and recalled that Standard Oil originally paid Calumet College's heating bill, helping with the higher overhead of moving into a much bigger building.
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