Tinley Park Mayor Says He'll Take The Lucas Museum
By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 29, 2016 3:36PM
Designs for the Lucas Museum (Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)
Tinley Park may be proud to be the 20th biggest city in Illinois even though that is... faint praise at best. It may also be a village, making its claim to be a fine-sized city semantically confusing. But here's one thing you can't knock Tinley Park for: having an unambitious mayor. The village's highly ambitious mayor, Dave Seaman, is making a play for the modernist blob that is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
Seaman sent a letter to Star Wars creator and unofficial nerd king George Lucas, the Daily Southtown reports, pitching a 280-acre lot at the corner of 183rd Street and Harlem Avenue in Tinley Park as the site of Lucas's museum.
"Long, long ago, in a village not too far away..." began the letter, according to the Daily Southtown.
Seaman isn't delusional. "I'm sure Mr. Lucas gets about a million of these," he told the Daily Southtown. "But you know what? Stranger things have happened." His letter, written by village Public Information Coordinator Jason Freeman, also ends with "May the force be with you." "Jay's a bit of a 'Star Wars' nerd," Seaman told the Daily Southtown.
Lucas has been trying to bring his museum to Chicago for more than a year. However, Chicago's Friends of the Parks have taken to court to fight the current plans for the museum, which put it on a lakefront lot just South of Soldier Field that they'd rather see become a park than a Star Wars shrine. Earlier this month, Mayor Rahm Emanuel expressed concern that the legal battle would prompt Lucas would take his museum elsewhere.
Emanuel did not mention concerns about Tinley Park specifically, probably because it's not a major city or even a city at all. (It's a village!) And with a population just under 57,000, Tinley Park is a fortieth the size of Chicago, if you round generously in Tinley Park's favor. (Chicago had a population of 2.7 million as of 2013, according to Census Bureau data.)