If you need more evidence of how badly downtown Chicago is struggling to recover from the pandemic, look no further than two recent pieces of news.

The first wasn’t surprising. The office vacancy rate downtown hit a record 28% in the third quarter, according to data from real estate firm CBRE. Nearly three of every 10 square feet of office space in the central business district is going unleased right now. Brutal.

But the second was a jolt. Walgreens, now owned by a New York private equity firm, said Monday that it’s departing its 200,000 square foot space at the Old Post Office, the massive building straddling the Eisenhower Expressway, which serves as a gateway to downtown from the west. The pharmacy chain will relocate an undisclosed number of workers — at one point, there were 1,800 in the Old Post Office space — to its Deerfield headquarters by the end of January.

That will create a royal commuting headache for Walgreens employees who live in the city or in the west suburbs. As we understand it, the company is requiring its workers in the office four days a week.

But the decision also is a symbolic blow to Chicago.

It was only five years ago — just a month before COVID sent office workers home for months on end, doing their jobs via Zoom calls and remote computer links to their offices — that Walgreens moved workers into the renovated post office. Walgreens’ lease for the 200,000 square feet, signed in 2018, was that project’s biggest deal at the time, paving the way for a parade of other corporate tenants to follow. The old main post office, an embarrassing empty husk for decades, emerged as a triumph — one of the largest adaptive redevelopments of a historic building in U.S. history.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who succeeded in luring a host of Chicago’s biggest corporations to open major outposts or move their suburban headquarters to the city, said in October 2018 at an event announcing a separate Walgreens’ investment in the city, “We’re not resting until you leave Deerfield completely.”

That didn’t age well.

Emanuel spoke those words just seven years ago, but it feels like 70 years ago. Before the work-from-home upheaval, corporate employers perceived downtown Chicago as where they had to be in order to appeal to younger workers who lived in the city and had no appetite for long train or car trips to the suburbs.

Now?

Sycamore Partners, owner of Walgreens following a $10 billion deal that closed in August for the previously publicly traded company, wasn’t offering much beyond corporate platitudes to explain its decision. The company’s lease at the Old Post Office runs through 2032, so the achievement of substantial cost savings may depend on whether it can sublease the space.

“Centralizing our workforce allows us to reinvest in the on-campus experience while fostering stronger collaboration and alignment across teams,” CEO Mike Motz said in his message to employees.

Of course, what Motz didn’t say is that Walgreens’ Deerfield footprint has gotten far smaller in the past year. The company for decades owned a sprawling campus in the north suburb but sold 18 acres last year. It’s fair to wonder whether its current scaled-down Deerfield space can accommodate all of Walgreens’ white-collar workers in the area.

Which raises the question as to whether Walgreens’ new private equity owner is envisioning significant staff reductions — from folks leaving the company because they don’t want to trek to Deerfield, from layoffs, or from a combination of the two.

Whatever happens next, the first major local move Sycamore Partners has made since taking over one of Chicago’s most storied corporate names a little over two months ago is yet another example of how Chicago becomes an afterthought when locally based companies sell to out-of-town buyers.

When Walgreens’ Old Post Office plans were first announced in 2018, then-company President Alex Gourlay was effusive: “The space in the iconic Old Post Office building allows us to attract and retain the best talent from all of Chicagoland.”

A different owner effectively has concluded precisely the opposite — that a presence in this centrally located, cosmopolitan, transit-rich city simply isn’t a necessity. Ouch.

We acknowledge some amount of relief that Sycamore intends to keep Walgreens headquartered in Deerfield. And thankfully Walgreens occupies just 7% of the gargantuan post office, with virtually all of the remainder leased.

But let’s be honest: this news stings. The city loses many hundreds of workers who are downtown most days of the week. Grabbing lunch. Shopping. Going out after work.

And it loses just a little bit more prestige.

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