Inside the Abandoned Allstate Headquarters, a 2 Million Square Foot Campus Before Demolition

Allstate’s old headquarters campus was partly gone when we walked it. One building had already been leveled, and the rest was waiting its turn. I explored this one with StringerMedia.

It is only explorable on weekends because of the demolition, and the whole place looked newer than it should have. The video is a last look at a campus built for thousands of people, with the two of us as the only ones in it.

What we found

The first thing I saw was an Allstate door with “You’re in good hands” on the glass and a social distancing sticker still stuck to it. Then came a noise like somebody running at us, which scared me. It turned out to be water leaking through the ceiling and an elevator that sounded the same as footsteps.

The hallway we started in still had power. It was a skyway of glass, so you could see the reflection of the highway in the windows, and the lights flickered on as we walked. Motivational quotes were printed on the walls of a bunch of hallways. We found a sign for Building G listing an auditorium, a conference center and a cafeteria, and the building looked like a maze. I only wanted to record the interesting parts because I did not want to bore anyone with hallways.

Down in the basement was the Allstate Creative Production Studio. There was heat in there, a lot of stairs, and lockers in hallways that reminded me of the Backrooms, just nicer.

The tech cafe was a find I was glad we made the detour for. There was a giant coffee bar, a kitchen with hot lights for the food line, and a water softener, and the flat screens were gone. Some copper was still showing, and I was surprised scrappers hadn’t taken it. The glass stairwell between the eighth and seventh floors was pretty cool too.

We climbed about ten flights to the executive area. It had a coffee bar, a party room, and offices with a view of the interstate, ten stories up. The elevators were out of service. From up there the leveled building was a pile of rubble.

Underground was a parking garage with spots for electric vehicle charging, and we guessed only executives parked there. There was a transformer marked with lockout tagout procedures and a server room with the lights coming on as we walked in. A lockbox held executive vehicle keys, and the last security entry in the log was 10/2/22, about a month before we were there.

Why the Allstate campus is abandoned

Allstate has occupied the Northbrook campus since 1967. By 2021 it had about 8,000 employees in Illinois, and the company said 95 percent of its workforce had been working from home since the pandemic began. A spokeswoman said employees “have more choice about where they work and many are choosing to work from home.”

On November 29, 2021, Allstate announced it would sell most of the campus to Dermody Properties, a Nevada industrial developer, for $232 million. The campus held about 2 million square feet of office space. The sale would also cut Allstate’s real estate costs, and the company said it would keep a significant presence in the Chicago area.

Dermody said it planned to demolish the existing campus before building warehouses, and it needed approval from Glenview, Northbrook and Prospect Heights.

What happens next

By June 2026 the site was no longer an office campus. Dermody had finished a first phase of five warehouses totaling 1.2 million square feet, and the full plan calls for ten warehouses totaling 3.2 million square feet. A tenant had signed a lease for one warehouse in 2025, and a real estate investment firm bought part of the site for $175 million.

The warehouses going up now stand where we found that lockbox of executive keys.