The Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, will commemorate its seventh anniversary with a one-day-only special opportunity on Thursday, February 14, presented in partnership with the Chicago History Museum. The event coincides with the 90th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. For the first time, all visitors to the Museum will have the opportunity to experience The Chicago 00 Project’s virtual reality experience dedicated to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, courtesy of a grant from the Union Pacific Foundation. In addition, Nevada residents will receive free admission and non-Nevada residents will receive buy-one, get-one admission all day beginning at 9 a.m.
Released in February 2017, this award-winning VR experience transports audiences to the exact spots where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre events unfolded by superimposing images from then and now in virtual reality. Audiences can use their smartphones and wear Google Cardboard VR Goggles or use the Museum’s latest technology, Oculus Go, on YouTube’s 360 channel to be immersed in the site. A narrator tells the story of the massacre while giving a virtual tour of five sites and more than 30 historical photos and documents from the Chicago History Museum’s archive. It provides eye-opening insights into the infamous February 14, 1929 event, when Chicago police discovered the bodies of seven men, all shot in the back and riddled with bullets in a northside garage. The site and men were associated with the Prohibition-era bootlegging gangs, then led by Al Capone and Bugs Moran. The gruesome photographs of the scene ran on the front page of newspapers across the country and were some of the most influential crime photos in American history. The photos collected here—some well-known, some rare—tell this familiar Chicago story in a new way.
The Chicago 00 Project was created to produce and publish a series of site-specific, interactive, immersive multimedia experiences designed to showcase the Chicago History Museum's film, photo and sound archive and share Chicago's stories in new ways.
In addition to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Wall and the Chicago 00 experience, Museum guests can see other permanent exhibits related to the Massacre. Other artifacts include ballistics evidence recovered from the scene and original coroner’s documents concerning the victims and reports prepared by pioneering forensic scientist, Calvin Goddard.
For more information about the Museum, visit themobmuseum.org.
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