Couldnt 100k be a test run for future? Or do you think this will be sold out by the time of opening. I've seen it a bunch of times, in highrises especially, but renting 1 floor turns into 3 or 4 floors the following 3-5 years. Depending how they and thier clients like it.

Sure. I prefer they just start big, even if the HQ stays in Deerfield.

When Walgreens announced opening the office at The Sullivan Center, Crains reported that they have a 16 building campus with 6,500 employees. Anyone knows if that is accurate?

It starts with a trickle.

Discover has about 4,000.

Most of Discover's footprint in Riverwoods is back-office stuff, I believe. Customer service, transaction processing, etc (although they apparently have these in Phoenix and SLC too). Not stuff that needs top-dollar downtown office space. If they do move downtown, I assume it would only be a handful of departments plus the C-suite.

Northern Trust admittedly put their back-office in a Loop-adjacent location on Canal, but I don't think anyone will ever get land that cheap again so close to the Metra stations.

Also worth noting that both Discover and Allstate started as units of Sears before being spun off into Fortune 500 companies in their own right. For anyone that doubts why we need Amazon (the new Sears), this is why.

No. Riverwoods is all corporate functions. No customer service.

I came across 2 webcams that are set up in the post office. They both seem to be offline and I'm not sure if they will come back up.

But you can still watch time lapses of the gutting of the inside of the building.

https://public.earthcam.net/jll#/Old...K%201/View%201

I heard today that United has been actively looking at a move to the Post Office because they have already outgrown their current space in Willis Tower.

Sorry Amazon, you missed out, no space left in Chicago...

Except for the giant brownfield sites we can offer in all directions from downtown...

The entire corporate HQ of United and Walgreens shouldn't come close to filling the OPO. Especially if Walgreens only plans to move a portion of its Deerfield operations downtown. There will be plenty of space (at least the initial 500,000 sqft in the RFP) for Amazon to start with, and the land around the OPO as well as Union Station expansion project.

If anything, having existing tenants might make the OPO more attractive to Amazon. It can eventually buy out their leases and kick them out as it expands and grows.

This is of course assuming the OPO is Amazon's top prospect in Chicago, which it may or may not be. I frankly don't care where they land, as long as it's within city limits :)

LOL.... the Old Post Office will have 2.7 million square feet of space. Amazon wants up to 8 million square feet. The proposal for the post office never included just the post office. It also includes the Union Station redevelopment as well as some vacant land to build new things on. Kind of ridiculous to throw this out even if it amounts to 500k square ft being taken.

Come on, they were clearly joking

This implies there is no more space available in Willis Tower which is very much not true, even with the recent Morgan Stanley announcement. Also I find it hard to believe that Blackstone would be willing to let their main tenant of 850K sqft leave over lack of space in a building that has over 4m sqft.

I suppose it's possible that United got a hell of a discount on their lease and Blackstone feels that with the new investments they can re-lease the space at a much higher rate and so they're willing to let United walk.

Could be the lack of open contiguous spaces. United is leasing, if I remember right, floors 5 thru 17 and 21 through 23. Floors 18 through 20 are held by Willis and with the recent signing of Morgan Stanley I don't think there are any large contiguous blocks available at the moment (tower is currently 90% leased).

The ongoing renovations are also a major headache. Beyond nuking amenities (imagine eliminating all of the food vendors in the dead of winter) the timeline for completion stinks (2019 to 2020) and there's also an ongoing elevator renewal program that will drag on till 2023 (each elevator is being refurbished and the generators are being replaced & updated which takes 3 months per elevator) so for a bank of six elevators serving a dozen floors that's 18 months of disruption.

Honestly it kind of sucks working here at the moment.

OPO in NYT
 

Not new news, NYT article on post offices in US adaptive reuse in general, mainly shines on Chicago. Some new interviews and pics.

NYT link

Live-look inside the Post Office. They are at full-speed ahead.

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4624/...8f1b3cd8_b.jpg

I wonder why sprinklers are needed for a concrete frame building? That's a lot of iron pipe there.

Good to know the sprinkler-fitting is done, though (and presumably any concrete/asbestos work) and they're already doing mechanicals.

By code in Chicago your egress capacity increases 50 percent if it has sprinklers.

Building appears to be steel frame in this photo. You can see the fire block wrapped around the beams with a couple tiles missing exposing the steel

It's normally not smoke from the structural components of a building that kills you....rather the super heated and toxic smoke from the buildings contents.

Those look like nice tall floor heights 13-14 feet high?.

I hope they keep them open like via a loft and not do a drop ceiling calling from the 70's with popcorn ceilings.

I read some floors spaces are 19 feet tall or is that just the lobby?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/b...velopment.html


The redevelopment will turn former mail-processing areas into uncommon office spaces, taking advantage of expansive spaces with 19-foot-high ceilings, said Brian Whiting, president of Telos Group, a Chicago brokerage firm looking for tenants to fill the building. The biggest floor space stretches 285,000 square feet.

...

out of 2.8 million sq feet


Here is a nice 49 page of PDF of the post office history


https://www.cityofchicago.org/conten...relim_Summ.pdf