Halloween Weekend: What is the SCARIEST Movie You Ever Saw?

I think that The Devil in the White City may make a great horror movie based on fact, if given a good screen treatment.

Have we talked about this before? I thought “White City” was
one of the most fascinating books I have read. I had a step
daughter at the U of Chicago while reading it and we tried
to retrace a lot of the book. Some of the campus is built on
the fair site.

I won at auction a copy of the book at a high school reunion a couple of years ago, donated by another attendee. I hadn't heard of the book, or the story, before then.

The main green belt running east-west through the campus is the former midway of the Exposition.

Part of the expo became Jackson Park; the present-day Museum of Science and Industry is the former Palace of Fine Arts, the only building that was built to survive the exposition.

Actually, its first post-fair use was as the Field Museum of Natural History for a few decades, before they built a new building, of a similar style, closer to the Loop, north of Soldier Field.

Then the MSI was founded with a major donation from Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears at the time.

Although I'm a North Side native, I did go to school one year a ways up the road from the U of C.

ps. Another historical book that dovetails nicely with The Devil in the White City is The Power Makers by Maury Klein. It relates the development of electric power in the late years of the 19th century and beyond.

He spends some time on the White City, because that was electric power's big coming-out party. Also, he relates the story of Samuel Insull, who essentially created the model of the modern power company, in Chicago.

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