The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

In the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, arch-villain The Joker blows up the Gotham City Hospital which disappears into a fireball of smoke and flames. Most film goers probably didn't realize that this was not a model or a computer generated image. The film crew actually exploded part of an abandoned factory only a few blocks from where I live. It was the old Brach's Candy plant on Chicago's West Side, a major landmark to anyone who travels on the CTA Green Line out to the Austin neighborhood or on to Oak Park and Forest Park.

What is left of the Brachs' Candy factory lies crumbling along Cicero Avenue, frequented only by the homeless, the professional junk scavengers, the graffiti artists and the urban adventurers who love to risk life and limb clambering around abandoned buildings. Brachs is only one example. Today most of Chicago's former industrial glory is a Machu Picchu of weedy rusting ruins or has been plowed under to grow a crop of yuppie condo buildings.

­Twas not always thus.