This is one of those tasks that sneaks up on you, that you find yourself completing without even realizing it. I had originally signed up for this intending to document the theater department at my university, which will soon be receiving new facilities, making the current ones a place that will no longer exist as they are, and then I stumbled across this while walking to dinner the other day.

As some of you (mostly fellow CG0 players, more than likely) may know, there is currently a film about 1930's gangster John Dillinger. being shot in various locations in Chicago, Wisconsin, and Indiana. I've had many a friend tell me that they've gone to bed, only to be kept up all night by gunshots from filming going on down the street. I did not know that the filming would be coming to my own neighborhood.

John Dillinger died (supposedly-there is some controversy about whether it was really him) in July of 1934 after being ambushed and shot leaving a Clark Gable movie at the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, just north of Fullerton. Amazingly, the Biograph is still there (though as a stage theater rather than a film house). The surrounding area has changed tremendously. Today it is a place of modern commercialism, with McDonalds on the corner and Qdoba right next door, CVS across the street and the local 24-hour hangout bumping the theater's shoulders. Though many of these thing are in the same buildings that existed in 1934, they are by no means the same businesses.

For Hollywood, however, nothing short of time travel will do. We can't have the most famous criminal in Roosevelt's America breathing his last outside of a CVS. Thus has the director decreed that, for a scant week or two, the buildings of Lincoln Avenue just north of Fullerton will not exist in 2008, but in 1934. Other CG0 members familiar with the area can testify to the fact that this is not the place we pass by on any given day. For but a few days we can once again admire the cakes in the window at A. Zito bakery, we can look in the window of a milliner and remember the days when everyone wore hats. Come back in a week, perhaps two or three, and this will all have vanished into the ether. In true Chrononaut style, I have not only trespassed the future in the completion of this task, but also trespassed the past. We, the lucky few, have been allowed to go to a place that nobody has been able to go to in decades, and that in another ten days, much less ten years, we will never be able to go again. So, I will savor my journey into history, and take it with me into a future that I am reminded, now more than ever, is always changing.