John Dillinger Museum visits rise at new Crown Point home

CROWN POINT, Ind. (AP) - The John Dillinger Museum has seen more visitors since moving from Hammond to Crown Point.

The museum saw nearly 26,500 visitors during its time in Hammond, including a high of more than 5,500 visitors in 2013, the (Northwest Indiana) Times (http://bit.ly/2fcwUdk ) reported. So far in 2016, there have been more than 6,800 visitors to the museum in Crown Point, and nearly 10,800 from its grand opening to its one-year anniversary.

The museum takes visitors through the life of Dillinger, an American gangster during the Great Depression era. He was gunned down July 22, 1934 as he exited the Biograph Theater in Chicago.

The museum moved into the historic Old Lake County Courthouse in Crown Point in July 2015 from its former home in the Indiana Welcome Center in Hammond, where it was located from 2008 to 2014.

Speros Batistatos, president and CEO of the South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority, said the spike in visitors at Crown Point prove it's the right location for the museum.

Museum visitors will get to experience a new layout and completely different version of the one that used to reside in Hammond.

"We put out different assets in the collection than we had before," Batistatos said. "We re-tooled it and gave it a new look."

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Information from: The Times, http://www.nwitimes.com