Skip to footer

Harpo Studios: Oprah Winfrey show's home to be sold

Harpo Studios in Chicago was the home of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" for 21 years. Oprah Winfrey is selling Harpo Studios to a developer, but the studio will remain on the property for another two years.

|
M. Spencer Green/AP/File
Oprah Winfrey reacting after a street outside her Harpo Studios in Chicago was proclaimed 'Oprah Winfrey Way' during a ceremony in 2011. Winfrey is selling Harpo Studios in Chicago to a developer.
  • By The Associated Press

| Chicago

Oprah Winfrey is selling Harpo Studios in Chicago to a developer, but the studio will remain on the property for another two years.

Winfrey filmed "The Oprah Winfrey Show" at the studio from 1990 to 2011, when she ended the talk show to start the Oprah Winfrey Network on cable.

"We have entered into a purchasing agreement with Sterling Bay for the four-building Harpo Studios campus in Chicago's West Loop,"Harpo told Crain's Chicago Business in a statement. "We expect the transaction to be closed in 30 days. The property will be leased back to Harpo for two years and the studio will continue to produce programming for OWN."

About 200 people work at the 3.5-acre(1.42-hectare) campus, which will sell for about $32 million, Crain's reported Sunday. Harpo said it expects to close the transaction in 30 days.

Winfrey first came to Chicago in 1984 to WLS-TV's morning talk show, "A.M. Chicago." A month later, the show was No. 1 in the market and renamed "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 1985.

Winfrey moved to Harpo Studios in 1990 and is credited with transforming the once-gritty industrial area to a neighborhood filled with families and trendy restaurants.

In 2011, then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley named the street outside Harpo Studios "Oprah Winfrey Way."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Harpo Studios: Oprah Winfrey show's home to be sold
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0317/Harpo-Studios-Oprah-Winfrey-show-s-home-to-be-sold
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe