A curious crowd has gathered in Chicago’s Old Town, where a film crew has spent a good portion of the night setting up shop.

Word has traveled through the neighborhood that the latest in the “Batman” series, “The Dark Knight,” starring Christian Bale as the Caped Crusader, is shooting scenes. People, many with cell phone cameras in hand, are craning their necks to look beyond the police barricades so they can see something — anything.

Waterlogged residents in northern Illinois were bracing themselves Tuesday for more rain—and checking their sump pumps—after flash floods overnight soaked basements, closed highways and forced at least 40 people to evacuate their homes in Rockford.

Hardest hit by the storms were Lake and McHenry Counties and part of southeast Rockford. At the height of the storm, nearly 50,000 Commonwealth Edison customers were without power in northern Illinois.

Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte SA said that traffic measured in vehicles on its Chicago Skyway totaled 56,651 units in July, up 1.91 pct from a year earlier.

Binil Samuel’s life seemed to be just beginning when it ended early Monday morning after a hit-and-run crash on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

Samuel and his friends had been bowling and were driving home when a black tow truck smashed into his friend’s Nissan. The truck stopped briefly, then fled, witnesses said.

CHICAGO — Two men were shot in separate incidents by gunmen who approached on bicycles late Monday on the South and Southwest Sides.

At about 10 p.m., three gunmen on bicycles shot a male standing at West 59th and South Mozart streets. The gunmen fled the scene after the shooting, according to police News Affairs Officer David Banks.

Make way Evanston. Watch out Oak Park. Berwyn is stepping out and demanding that attention be paid. Yes, Berwyn.

Long a bedroom community that many people might have overlooked in their search for a convenient and inviting suburb in which to put down roots, Berwyn is putting on a new face and marketing itself to the rest of metropolitan Chicago via a new ad campaign launched last month that purports to position Berwyn at the center of life in metropolitan Chicago.

Online T-shirt retailer Threadless has announced it will be opening its first brick-and-mortar retail store in its hometown of Chicago next month. The store will open its doors on Friday, September 14, and will celebrate the launch with two free concerts that night (one all ages, one over 18).

The company, which was started in 2000, has received more than 60,000 submissions and boasts more than 300,000 members.

This week, the family will gather again to mourn the sudden loss of Hyland, a Loyola University graduate who died after she was hit by a car this weekend on Chicago’s North Side.

Hyland was in Chicago visiting friends, with whom she had been having a night of fun when she was hit by a 2007 Chevrolet Impala about 4:30 a.m. Sunday. It was the middle of a rainstorm, police said, and she had been trying to cross the street against a traffic light in the 6800 block of North Sheridan Road when she was hit.

When Diane Rabe was pregnant, she didn’t want her crack cocaine addiction to filter down to the baby.

But she had tried and failed before to break the addiction chain, so instead, she started saving money for an abortion.

“But I got high with it,” the West Dundee woman said.
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In Cook County alone, there are more than 260,000 estimated hardcore crack users.

“Because there are few multi-family townhouses or apartments, it has a small-town feel.”

The same goes for Park Slope and Chicago’s Lincoln Park. They may feel disconnected from the city, but their denizens still report to the big-city mayor and send their kids to the cities’ school systems.

The National Weather Service has confirmed that a tornado touched down at about 6:15 p.m. on the southwestern edge of Bolingbrook but was confined to a very small area. It damaged two houses.