Inside the Abandoned Chicago Tribune Printing Plant, With the Papers Still on the Desks

The last Chicago Tribune printed at the Freedom Center came off the presses in May 2024. By the time we got inside, the plant was being demolished around the papers left in it. We hopped a couple of walls and a fence, ran for a gate while security was not looking, and had very little time. Demolition was active, so I had no idea how much would still be there.

We came on a Sunday, when no demo work was running. What made the video was the paper itself. Newspapers sat on control desks and in storage rooms where they were left on the last day, and one of them was a front page from September 11, 2001.

What we found

A friend had been inside a week earlier and said the power was still on. It wasn’t anymore, although we heard a buzzing from a locked room, so something had power. One of us went back to the car for water and another flashlight and found security sitting in the alley, staring. As far as we know they did not see him. We went on with a flashlight battery that was almost dead.

Down low were giant rolls of paper, which I took to be the newsprint, with oil all over them. Most of the lower level was stripped, and it looked like the wires had been scrapped.

The control room for the presses had units five, six and seven, a phone, and a lot of dials. One dial sped the press up to 70,000 papers an hour. Another panel nearby had been opened up, probably for scrapping, and the connectors had real gold on the pins, which is worth something if you know how to pull it. Sun Times pages were printed here too, not only the Tribune.

The press room was covered in ink. Purple, blue and red, one color per roller, and I had it on my hands and arms. Yellow ink was pooled on the floor. I don’t think that was only decay. I think they worked in those conditions. Above the machines were colored lights, and we guessed two were for shift changes and the red one was for oxygen, since they use CO2. We were only guessing.

The presses are about three stories tall, four with the basement. The paper starts at the bottom and works its way up to be cut, sorted and bundled.

On the control desks and in the sample rooms there were stacks of papers. The newest date I found was June 3, 2024. There were Wall Street Journals, Investor’s Business Daily, and Chicago Tribune and Sun Times issues from May 2024. Then two Chicago Tribune front pages from September 11, 2001, cut up and left in a control room. Someone had also written “It’s over” on a wall, with a smiley face.

The fourth floor was the sorting side, where finished papers came up through the ceiling before they were bundled. Someone had already taken some of the copper, and there was graffiti for a plant that had been closed about two months. The top floor was gutted. Below it the newsroom floor was stripped too, and from a window we could see security parked at the front gate. The ink smell got worse on the lower floors and covered my arms. We found employee badges in a control room, about a hundred fire extinguishers dated 2023, and a box of picket signs that said “Stop Alden. Save local news.”

The last room had a whiteboard in purple tinsel. “Goodbye Tribune, it was fun, 6/25/24,” with names signed under it. I took that as the last day in that part of the building. There was a big map of Chicago like the ones police use to pin crimes, and a note on a wall saying Lenny still sucks. My battery died there.

Why the Freedom Center is abandoned

The Freedom Center was built in 1981 as a $185 million plant, billed as the largest newspaper production facility in North America. Printing moved there from the basement of Tribune Tower in 1982. Ten Goss Metroliner presses ran there, producing upward of a million copies a day, and the plant printed the Chicago Tribune along with the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Sun Times and other papers.

What ended it was the land. In November 2022 Bally’s bought the 30 acre site on the Chicago River from Nexstar Media for $200 million, and Tribune Publishing agreed to be out by July 2024. Printing shifted to the Daily Herald plant in Schaumburg, which Tribune Publishing bought in May 2023, and the final run came the weekend of May 18 and 19, 2024.

Demolition began on August 27, 2024, at Halsted Street and Chicago Avenue. It had been pushed back after construction caissons were found to threaten underground city water lines.

What happens next

As of that August 2024 report, Bally’s planned a $1.7 billion casino and hotel complex on the site, with a 500 room hotel tower, a 3,000 seat theater and six restaurants. The permanent casino was scheduled to open in fall 2026.

The September 11 front page is the one I keep thinking about, lying in a control room in a plant that printed its last paper in May.