​Lucas Museum President Buys Home in Chicago Days Before Museum Plans Nixed

CHICAGO, IL - If there was ever a good example of bad timing, this is it.

Don Bacigalupi, the president of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art that once hoped to open on Chicago’s lakefront, bought a 19th century restored mansion in Lincoln Park in anticipation of the Museum’s arrival in Chicago.

The deal closed just six days after Star Wars creator George Lucas announced he would no longer consider the Midwest’s largest city as the locale for the museum according to a Chicago Tribune Elite Street report.

So now after paying $2.725 million for the four-level, 7,600-square-foot brick abode, he has to sell it. The museum is likely headed to California.

Can anyone find that “bad luck” meme? Here would be a nice place to insert that. Also, the closing music to Curb Your Enthusiasm would be appropriate.

"He put it under contract a long time ago, and there was a closing date. He could have chosen to walk away, but he did the honorable thing in going ahead and closing on it," Listing Agent Kathleen Malkin of Baird & Warner told Elite Street.

Lucas nixed plans to open the Museum just south of Soldier Field due to the lack of resolvement from a lawsuit initiated by the Friends of the Parks group. The group sued, claiming the lakefront was not the place for the museum and offered the former Michael Reese Hospital site as an alternative. Lucas has said all along he wants the museum near a waterfront.

The mansion Bacigalupi hopes to soon sell has original stained-glass windows, white gallery-style walls, two decks and an elevator.