Longtime Chicago broadcast journalist Walter Jacobson, who on March 27 signed off from delivering his weekly “Perspective” commentaries on WGN-AM, has his three-bedroom, 2,800-square-foot co-op unit on the Gold Coast on the market for $1.075 million, and he has struck a deal to sell it.
Jacobson, 87, topped the TV news ratings as a co-anchor with Bill Kurtis on WBBM-Channel 2’s 10 p.m. newscasts in the 1970s and ‘80s, and he spent another 13 years as a news anchor at WFLD-Channel 32 before reuniting with Kurtis for several years on a newscast on WBBM. He joined WGN radio in 2014.
On the Gold Coast, Jacobson paid $762,500 in 2010 for his co-op unit, which is on the third floor of a vintage building. The unit has three bathrooms, three exposures, an expansive floor plan, a bedroom that was converted to a closet and another bedroom that was converted to a family room.
Jacobson first listed the unit for $1.15 million on March 13. He reduced his asking price to $1.075 million on March 21, and he found a buyer two days later. The deal is set to close in mid-May, he said.
“I’ve loved living (in this building),” Jacobson told Elite Street. “It’s a great, wonderful and beautiful old building. I have mixed feelings. I love this building. And everything I need to do to survive — the drugstore, the bank and the grocery store — all is within a five-minute walk on Division Street, and in the summer, the marketplace on Division is a wonderful piece of Chicago.”
Jacobson’s listing agent, Nick Powers of Baird & Warner, resides in the building himself. He noted that Jacobson’s late wife, Susie, oversaw a full-scale, gut renovation of the co-op when the couple bought it in 2010.
“It’s a lot of square footage, and it’s an apartment in a very desired, vintage co-op building. We have a yard, which is unusual, and we’re on Astor, and it was decorated well,” Powers told Elite Street. “We got two cash offers.”
Jacobson previously had owned a five-bedroom, three-story Lincoln Park mansion from 1972 until 1978, and he owned it again from 1994 until 2010, when he sold it for $1.975 million.
Jacobson is selling the co-op unit to move to a Chicago senior living community.
“I didn’t want to move, but my kids convinced me that I should be in a place with some help, and with other people,” he said.
The unit has a $3,565-a-month homeowners association assessment.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
