Report: LA Planning Commission OKs Lucas Museum development

Plans are moving ahead in Los Angeles to build the museum that “Star Wars” creator George Lucas had wanted to put on Chicago’s lakefront.

The Los Angeles Planning Commission on Thursday OK’d the development proposal for the filmmaker’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, television station KFMB in San Diego is reporting. The structure will be built in LA’s Exposition Park.

Plans call for the museum to have five stories, totaling about 300,000 square feet of floor area. It will include a cafe and restaurant, theaters, office space, lecture halls, a library, classrooms, exhibition space and landscaped open space according to the television station’s report.

Lucas had wanted to build the museum in Chicago, settling on a lakefront site: a parking lot just south of Soldier Field. He had the backing of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a host of civic leaders. But a lawsuit by Friends of the Parks, and some negative public reaction to the proposed design, helped push Lucas to pull the plug on the project in Chicago and head west.