Next week, the Chicago Park District board is expected to vote thumbs up or down on a deal to die for: a lease that would give the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts a prime hunk of lakefront land for 99 years with two renewable options. That’s 297 years at a total cost of just $30.
Since they wanted to hear from as many people as possible, it was probably just an oversight that Park District officials scheduled the first meeting, held at Columbia College, for 2 PM on a Tuesday, when a lot of folks had to be at work. (They held the second on Wednesday at 6 PM, a better time but at a worse location—the fortress that is McCormick Place.)
They included Don Bacigalupi, who became the museum’s founding president earlier this year. (Lucas stole him away from Walmart heir Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where he’d had the same job.) He compared the founding of the Lucas Museum to that of the Field, the Shedd, and the Adler.
The museum, which will be dedicated to storytelling, “unfolds like a story,” Siegel said. Ergo: splat.
