The first chunk of the Freedom Center printing plant came tumbling down Tuesday morning during a ceremonial demolition event, paving the way for the planned $1.7 billion Bally’s Chicago Casino along the banks of the Chicago River.
Bally’s Chairman Soo Kim and city officials were on hand as an excavator smashed an awning over a truck bay of what was once the largest newspaper printing plant in North America, now a hulking empty shell still emblazoned with the familiar Chicago Tribune sign on its southern wall.
“It’s very gratifying,” said Kim, after the demolition ceremony. “It will be even more exciting when the first bricks start coming up.”
More symbolic than substantial, it took seconds to tear down a small piece of history after more than four decades as the publishing engine of the Chicago newspaper industry. The demolition took place on a sweltering summer day amid a theatrical red smoke cannon, piped-in music, festive balloons and a crowd of invited onlookers, who cheered the first smash of what will be a lengthy process.
The rest of the 940,000-square-foot plant is expected to be reduced to rubble over the next three to five months, Kim said, as Bally’s clears the 30-acre River West site for a dramatic repurposing as an entertainment mecca.
In 2022, Rhode Island-based Bally’s won a heated competition to build Chicago’s first casino. The proposal includes an exhibition hall, a 500-room hotel, a 3,000-seat theater, 10 restaurants and 4,000 gaming positions, making it the largest casino in the state.
Bally’s Chicago launched a temporary facility at Medinah Temple last fall, with plans to open the permanent casino by September 2026.
It has been an eventful summer for Bally’s, which owns and operates 15 casinos across 10 states, and the future site of its flagship casino.
Last month, Bally’s announced a $2 billion financing deal with Gaming and Leisure Properties, a Pennsylvania-based real estate investment trust, including $940 million to fund the construction of the permanent Chicago casino, allaying concerns it didn’t have the wherewithal to complete the project.
Bally’s also finalized redesign of its planned 500-room hotel tower, which was shifted from north of the casino to the south to avoid damaging city water pipes along the Chicago River, pending approval from the city’s planning department.
Standard General, which owns about 26% of Bally’s, reached an agreement with the board on July 25 to buy out the rest of the stockholders at $18.25 per share, valuing the casino company at $975 million. The deal to take the company private is expected to close during the first half of 2025, pending shareholder and regulatory approval.
Meanwhile, after 43 years and countless millions of newspapers, the Freedom Center printed its last Chicago Tribune in May, shifting production to the northwest suburban Daily Herald plant, a smaller but newer facility that Tribune Publishing purchased last year for an undisclosed price.
Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Freedom Center was built in 1981, a massive plant with 10 new Goss Metroliner offset presses capable of printing 75,000, 144-page newspapers an hour. At its peak, it ran 24/7, churning out newspapers for the Tribune, as well as longtime clients such as the Chicago Sun-Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
But the rise of digital media in the new millennium precipitated a rapid erosion in print circulation, slowing production at the Freedom Center and making the facility and its prime North Side real estate expendable.
Last year, Bally’s, which bought and then executed a sale-leaseback on the property, agreed to pay Tribune Publishing $150 million to vacate the Freedom Center by July 5 to break ground on the casino complex.
In May, Tribune completed an auction for everything from printing equipment, dump trucks and forklifts to historical newspapers and press plates in a Freedom Center final liquidation. In addition, Preservation Chicago assembled a substantial collection of historical material culled from the facility.
There were no buyers, however, for the two giant Chicago Tribune exterior signs on the north and south sides of the building.
After taking possession of the property, Bally’s removed the sign on the north side of the building and put it in storage. The southern sign, long a landmark for drivers on the Kennedy Expressway feeder ramp at Ohio and Ontario streets, remained up in the air as demolition begins.
Kim said Tuesday he plans to remove the southern sign as well, and hopes to incorporate it into the new casino complex, in much the same way developers kept the Tribune Tower sign on the newspaper’s century-old neo-Gothic landmark, which was sold in 2016 and converted to condos.
“We have to coordinate with the paper, but we’d love to give it a place of honor,” Kim said. “So we might see the sign in the lobby somewhere.”
