The dinosaur was a T. rex. That’s what Osgood and I figured, based not on any real scientific knowledge but rather on a couple of movies we’d seen.
The place where this creature and others were standing is called the Chicago Metropolitan Corp., a vast complex on Roosevelt Road just west of Western Avenue. It is home to one of the biggest sound stages in the city, where parts of such films as “Prelude to a Kiss,” “The Untouchables,” “Only the Lonely” and “Poltergeist III” were filmed.
Many movies are made in Chicago. Since the formation of the Chicago Film Office in the mid-1970s, hardly a week goes by that doesn’t find our streets clogged with cameras and stars.
But every time I read some ga-ga gossip-column item about a star sighting, I am reminded that Chicago was once the filmmaking capital of the country. That would have been roughly between 1907 and 1917. That was when the Selig and Essanay studios (near Western Avenue and Irving Park Road and West Argyle Street, respectively) were grinding out silent films (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
As Arnie Bernstein writes in his lively book, “Hollywood By the Lake” (Lake Claremont Press), “When Hollywood was nothing more than a tiny community in southern California, the Windy City was on the cutting edge of the motion picture industry.”
Most movie companies come here now not for studio space but for locations, so what movie work goes on at Chicago Metropolitan Corp. goes unnoticed. So, too, do the other things the company does: serving as the Midwest’s largest supplier of used office furniture and systems, and its largest estate liquidation company; one of the area’s biggest commercial moving companies; and a massive storage operation, with 4 million cubic feet.
The dinosaurs were not movie props but were being stored on the property between museum shows. Some 20 animals were placed outside for the enjoyment of neighborhood kids.
One of them was 10-year-old Natalie Pena in the photo above, able to find a few minutes of real magic that had nothing whatsoever to do with the manipulated images of movies.
