Pretty, Dilapidated Stuff

Local photog and friend of historical landmarks Carey Primeau has a knack for making crumbling walls and piles of garbage look beautiful (as displayed in our February roundup of Flickr greats with the haunting photo of a deserted classroom from Chicago’s Jacob Riis Elementary School).

Primeau recently expanded beyond Chicago’s disregarded treasures and traveled through Europe visiting abandoned buildings destined to be forgotten by history…

Found Art

Uncovering Chicago’s best-kept secrets: Carrie Hanson, artistic director of local dance company The Seldoms, devotes her latest full-length dance to … trash.

15 Minutes With … Plain White T’s frontman Tom Higgenson

At this point, the story behind the Chicago band Plain White T’s 2007 breakout song “Hey There Delilah” is the stuff of local legend. I sat down with frontman Tom Higgenson—who was playing a mini acoustic set Friday night at a launch party for 24/7 Chicago, NBC-5’s new local entertainment show hosted by Catie Keogh, Jamie Blyth (of The Bachelorette, circa Jen Schefft), and Billy Dec—to get the real dirt on…

American Gigolo

Fifty years ago this April, a young man from Woodstock, Illinois, named Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death in the bedroom of his lover, the movie goddess Lana Turner. Stompanato was a minor hoodlum and notorious Lothario, and news accounts eviscerated his character in the media frenzy after his death. Now a writer, also from Woodstock, follows a fading trail to find how a small-town Midwesterner landed at the heart of one of Hollywood’s most enduring scandals.