![]() Before the epidemic, 15,000 employees arrived there daily. “On Thursday between 8 and 9 a.m., Tribune reporters counted 75 people passing through its main entrance,” the paper reported on September 25, 2020. At the Tower, office occupancy rose by about 45% between the first week in February and the first week in March. Two years after leaving downtown offices, employees return to Willis Tower on March 15, 2022. That year, five would-be American terrorists were convicted of plotting to bomb Sears Tower. It was tempted to make the move in part by Chicago’s offer of about $25 million in incentives, the Tribune reported, while also noting: “United is drawing fire from aviation experts who question why it would locate its nerve center in a building identified as a potential target of terrorists.” United Airlines reversed Sears’ suburban flight, transferring its operations center’s 2,000 flight controllers and support staff from Elk Grove Township to Willis Tower in 2009. Prospective buyers continued to make offers, and financial institutions were willing to cover bets on Sears Tower’s value.īlue-chip companies took over the 1.5 million square feet vacated by Sears. “And in the long run there is some potential upside.”Įvidently Szady knew how the real estate market works. ![]() “There is some tarnish on the diamond now, but it will come back,” Kenneth Szady, an executive with the Trammell Crow realty company, told the Tribune. Trizec Properties inherited Sears’ responsibility for loan payments due MetLife and, unable to make a 2003 installment, gave the keys to the building to the insurance company. Khan was apparently taking a dig at the Loop’s more nondescript buildings, a mold Paul Gapp, the Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, agreed they broke away from by designing a skyscraper “whose exteriors are a bold, vital, and exciting departure from orthodox mediocrity.”Īfter Sears cut its Tower loose, others bought and sold it, even when it teetered on a precipice of bankruptcy. “But we wanted something that wouldn’t be too prismatic.” “Sears probably would have settled for a squatty 50- or 60-story building - something sturdy, efficient and durable,” said Fazlur Khan, the structural engineer who, with architect Bruce Graham, drew plans for the tower. Sears Tower’s architects gave their client a far larger building than the company’s honchos likely envisioned. Perhaps ambitious architects seduced them into thinking of Sears as too big to fail. His successors ignored Cushman’s diagnosis. “You hit it five times on the tail with a sledgehammer, and 11 years later the impulse will reach the brain.” “Sears is like a dinosaur,” Joe Cushman who retired as Sears chairman in 1967, once observed. Sears provided the model that Amazon would later capitalized on, but it wasn’t nimble enough to adapt to the digital age. ![]() It enabled rural families to enjoy the same consumer goods as their urban counterparts with access to stores. Sears was founded in 1892 and virtually invented home shopping with a catalog as thick as Chicago’s telephone directory. ![]() “How will I get there?” was the most asked question from staffers, recalled Barb Lehman, the Sears executive who directed the exodus of 5,000 from Chicago to suburbia. Sears left the building for corporate campus in Hoffman Estates in the 1992, a move that bruised Chicago’s civic pride and complicated commutes for many employees. The company sold Sears Tower and closed stores but couldn’t make a payment on the loan keeping it afloat. By 1991, Walmart’s sales had overtaken Sears’, which went through a long decline before filing for bankruptcy in 2018. But it didn’t ring the corporate cash registers. Sears Tower spurred the redevelopment along the Chicago River’s west banks and in adjoining neighborhoods. ![]()
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