Walgreens Boots Alliance plans to vacate its large office within Chicago’s Old Post Office, the ultrawide structure whose redevelopment the drugstore giant played a key role in, as the company consolidates workers at its north suburban headquarters campus.
The company said it will leave behind the 200,000-square-foot office in the building at 433 W. Van Buren St. in January.
Downtown workers will move to the headquarters campus in Deerfield, Illinois, a spokesperson for the company said in an emailed statement. A Walgreens store on the ground floor of the building will remain open, the company said.
It’s unclear what will happen with the Old Post Office space. Walgreens could look to sublease it to other tenants. The lease runs until December 2032, according to CoStar data.
“Walgreens remains headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois, where the company has been rooted for decades,” the statement said. “As we renew our focus on our stores and customer experience, we have made the decision to exit our office space at the Old Post Office in January 2026.
“Our commitment to serving communities across the country begins in our pharmacies and retail locations, and this decision reflects our continued prioritization of those investments.”
Walgreens’ plans to leave the Old Post Office, reported earlier by the Chicago Tribune, come about a month after the company was taken private by New York-based private equity firm Sycamore Partners in a $10 billion deal that split the company into five separate companies.
The move comes more than seven years after Walgreens said it would relocate about 1,800 employees to the Old Post Office as New York-based 601W was in the process of redeveloping it. Those workers moved from another office downtown and from the Deerfield campus.
The lease was a key moment in the redevelopment of the long-vacant structure, with leases to follow with big tenants such as Uber, PepsiCo, Cboe Global Markets, Cisco Systems and Ferrara Candy. The building has 2.3 million square feet of office space.
After spending nearly $1.3 billion on the project, 601W refinanced the building with an $830 million loan.
The Urban Land Institute described the project as the largest historic redevelopment of a building.
It also is believed to be the world’s widest urban office building, with floors as wide as 282,000 square feet. A rooftop park spans 3.5 acres, making it the nation’s largest private rooftop.
The Old Post Office sat vacant for two decades before the redevelopment.
It’s unclear how many Walgreens employees work in the Chicago space or on the Deerfield campus.
Walgreens in recent years has been scaling back the size of its once-sprawling suburban headquarters campus.
The company sold buildings on 18 acres of its campus to PulteGroup late last year for $5.1 million. The homebuilder plans to demolish outdated office buildings on Wilmot Road and replace them with 42 single-family homes.
In August, Orion Properties announced plans to demolish vacant buildings that were once leased to Walgreens to create 37.5 acres of land in Deerfield that could be redeveloped. That came after a deal to sell the land to Chicago-based LG Development Group for a redevelopment fell through.