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Chicago film critic Sergio Mims tossed this bit of news to me late yesterday: The website Deadline New York is reporting Leonardo DiCaprio and his team have acquired the film rights to Erik Larson's 2003 best-seller, Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America. DiCaprio will play serial killer H.H. Holmes, the true-life maniac who used the fair to lure victims to his veritable chamber of horrors on West 63rd Street.

Plans to turn Larson's book into a movie have bounced around for years now, with Tom Cruise looking to give a go of it at one point. This blog in April asked "Where in the Devil is the White City Movie?" Several of you thought DiCaprio would make a good Holmes, while others said Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp would be good choices. (I think Alfred Molina or John Goodman would make a great Daniel Burnham...)

There's no studio deal yet, so it's all just talk at this point.

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Lakeside Center sits there, overlooking the shore as it has for 40 years. One wonders for how much longer.

For more than a decade after its 1971 completion, when you said "McCormick Place," the big, dark, glassy pavilion was it. Then came a quarter century of McCormick Place additions--a westward expansion that, thankfully, saved the lakefront, but left a landmark-quality modernist gem looking rather marooned on the east side of Lake Shore Drive. Separated from the pack and underutilized, the original McCormick Place seems a bit vulnerable now.

Will it come down? Mayor Daley has threatened a decade ago when he called it the Berlin Wall of the lakefront--he's right--and said it was too costly to maintain. And last year, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which owns McCormick Place, figured it would cost $100 million just to update the building; and a multi-million updating of the facility in the late 1990s is barely more than a decade old...

What would you do with the building? Keep it? Demolish it? A demo would be a blow to the city's fledgling efforts to protect modern architecture. Would we want to lose a building by Gene R.

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Lincoln Park's Cafe Brauer is one of the city's most beautiful buildings. It's not quite a hidden gem, seeing that its near the well-traveled paths of Lincoln Park Zoo, but it is a building that's easy to overlook with all the action often going on on that stretch of Stockton Drive.

Built in 1908 and designed by Praire School architect Dwight Perkins (Schurz High School is among his better known buildings), Cafe Brauer began life as a restaurant, built by restauranteurs Paul and Caspar Brauer. But the restaurant was gone by the 1940s and the building--amazingly---spent nearly half of the 20th century as a storage before a late 1980s restoration by Lawrence B. Berkley & Associates, Meisel & Associates and Wiss Janney Elstner allowed it to re-emerge as a restaurant. It is a building beautiful details, including clay title insets, curving loggia and remarkable brickwork.

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I fell asleep with the TV on earlier this week, and awakened to a campaign commercial with the ghostly images of senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias appearing and re-appearing on the facades of Chicago architecture.

Couldn't be. This is what I get for eating that giant sandwich before going to bed, I thought.

Turns out the commercial is real.

The ad, paid for by the Washington D.C.

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Over the weekend, I caught this commercial for the new Chevrolet Cruze.

The 30-second spot shows the Chevy prowling the streets of Chicago on the hunt for its rival, the Honda Civic. Cinematic in approach, the commercial shows the Cruze cruising around some Chicago landmarks, including the Marina City parking ramps and the EL.  That 24hr coin laundry sign at 0:09 looks familiar, but I can't place it.  The shot of the car passing through a sliver of space between two buildings near South Water and Michigan at 0:13 is pretty cool, as is the part when the lights go out on the Art Deco marquee at Park Ridge's Pickwick Theater.

The tag line, "We're going hunting; it's Civic season," ain't bad either.

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The sun is slowly setting on a generation of old city firehouses.

Phased out by a new breed of larger, better-equipped firehouses,  many of the pre-1930 houses--mainstays of the Chicago Fire Department for close to a century--await new duties. The buildings compose one of the more beautiful classes of municipal architecture; beautifully-designed structures that complemented the neighborhoods in which they were built. Constructed during the height of  "City Beautiful," the stations--along with city-built schools and libraries--became the envoys that brought the movement into the neighborhoods.

The firehouse in the accompanying photographs is the old CFD Engine Co. 84, Truck 51, at 62nd and Green. Built in 1929, the fire station seemingly sits on an island as its original surrounding streets were demolished in the 1960s to create parking and access roads for the Englewood Concourse mall.

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 In a bid to save one of the oldest homes in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood from demolition, city preservation officials are seeking someone who will buy the 19th Century cottage for $1--but one buck--and then pay to move the entire structure to another lot in the community.

The city will even throw-in that other lot for an additional dollar.

The 1870s home, 3223 S. Indiana, is owned by the neighboring Illinois College of Optometry which seeks to demolish the house for expansion. But the demo request is subject to an automatic 90-day delay because the 130-year-old cottage is a highly-rated "orange" building  in the city's Chicago Historical Resources Survey.  The orange rating--second to a "red" rating--means the house possesses "some architectural feature or historical association that made [it] potentially significant in the context of the surrounding community," according to the survey. There are 9,600 orange-rated buildings in the survey.

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