Northside 777

I'm kind of nerdy. Certain things interest me that make no sense. For one thing, I like maps. I have a lot of old gas station highway maps, and a lot of old atlases going back to the late 1800s. I like comparing the maps of today to the old ones, road for road, street for street. Maybe that's why I never get lost. Mark gets lost, he got lost in every city we have ever visited. As an offshoot of knowing how to read a map, I have always wanted to know where the movie I am watching was filmed. I used to try to drive past the movie locations, here in Chicago and when I lived in other cities. Now I use Google Maps. I take the little yellow man down in the corner and drop him in front of places I think I saw in a movie. Such as this scene in Washington Heights, New York City.

 

1949 ----------------------------------------2019

Last Saturday I was watching a movie called 'Northside 777' on television. I've known that the movie existed for years, but I had never sat down and watched it. It was released in 1948 and it turns out that it was the first feature length movie ever filmed on location in Chicago. Chicago in 1948 looked a lot different than it does today, but there was one scene that caught my eye. Jimmy Stewart is walking down an old Chicago street and behind him is a church. Something about that church looked so familiar, so I Googled Chicago Catholic church photos. Seventeen rows down on that Google page, there it was. Holy Trinity Church. But the thing is, I had never seen that church up close before. What I had seen, what I had recognized, were the two towers. It turns out that I have driven past that church thousands of times on the Kennedy Expressway. Most of the neighborhood that stretched out before the church in that film is now under tons of concrete and dirt, being pounded by semi trucks and cars for the last sixty years.