Chicagoist Wayback Machine: Chicago 2-1-2

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 22, 2011 3:40PM

WBEZ's Lee Bey shared two clips of a 1957 television drama filmed in Chicago called Chicago 2-1-2 on his blog last week. The show, as Bey noted, was part of a DuPont Anthology series on ABC and starred Frank Lovejoy as Chicago Fire Department Inspector Ed McCook, tracking down an arsonist. Chicago 2-1-2 — the "2-1-2" being the call signature for the main fire alarm office at the time — was essentially Dragnet for firefighters.

Bey wrote about it because the show (shot in Chicago, almost unheard of at the time) made good use of the city's architecture and streets, and makes a good snapshot of the city in the early days of Richard J. Daley's tenure as mayor. But the clips Bey included were pulled from Youtube. We managed to find the full, unedited episode.