Abandoned Hewitt Associates Headquarters Near Chicago, Full of Mold and Graffiti

Hewitt Associates ran its headquarters out of a massive office complex in a Chicago suburb. By the time we got there it was full of mold and covered in graffiti, and according to the video description it has since been demolished.

The video opens on a warning about homeless Kelly, third floor, northwest corner office, who sometimes has cupcakes. We were just about to give up on the place when we found a board that slid open. It wasn’t even attached. That’s how we got into the complex.

What we found

The first room was the cafeteria. We sat at a round table, and there was a coffee maker, a soda machine and ice, plus a kitchen with no water. Signs said Grill Zone and Entree Zone, and there were instructions posted on the wall. One door locks when it closes, so we used something to prop it open.

The complex is a lot bigger than the cafeteria suggested. A skylight runs up over an open stairwell, and the walls around it are already tagged.

This wasn’t the lobby. Some of the drawers and cabinets are still in here, and there is a conference room. Then there is an open office floor that made me say that’s huge, with purple and yellow carpet tiles running toward a long row of windows.

The graffiti is everywhere. A sign said exit door only and that an alarm would sound, and somebody was nice enough to graffiti exit on it for us. There was also a cat. Another piece was left unfinished, and we couldn’t decide whether the artist ran out of spray paint or got caught.

Then the smell hit. I thought I could smell it, and I had a mask on. What I took for the front entrance was covered in mold, and it was gross. A sign by the glass doors still points two ways.

Upstairs the hallways are long and full of closed doors, and there are a bunch of warnings posted. One room was a server room, with the old desks still there. Someone found a spot to hide if the cops came, and said you have to work to find me.

We skipped the basement because there was so much mold, and headed up for better views instead. Nearly the entire building is empty rooms and server rooms. It was getting dark, and we had already seen the main attractions.

On the way out there was one more thing. A gray panel on the wall has a handwritten label for a floor storage closet, taped on with a Simplex sticker beside it. Past it was a sliding bookshelf with a hand crank, the kind used for unit files. We cranked one of them, and it moves.

Why the Hewitt campus sat empty

The video does not name the town, so this section follows the reporting on Hewitt’s headquarters. Business Insurance reported in October 2010 that the company’s headquarters was in Lincolnshire, Illinois, a northwest Chicago suburb, and that Hewitt had about 5,500 employees in the Chicago area, mostly there. Aon had acquired Hewitt on October 1, 2010, and a source said the Aon Hewitt headquarters was expected to stay in Lincolnshire. The merger was expected to eliminate 1,500 to 1,800 positions globally.

By 2015 the campus belonged to someone else. The Daily Herald reported in December 2017 that Medline Industries had owned the 43 acre site since January 2015 and never moved in, after buying a separate campus in Northfield. Aon Hewitt, the seller, still ran a data center in one office building. Two other office buildings sat unused and the site was described as mostly unused.

In 2017 a developer proposed tearing down the office buildings and a maintenance building to build a Topgolf and a 450,000 square foot fitness center called The St. James. By August 2018 the proposal was still in public hearings, and the mayor said the village already had a glut of vacant office space, so leaving the buildings alone was not a good option. The sources say what was proposed. They do not confirm what was built.

What was left inside, meanwhile, was a cafeteria, server rooms and a bookshelf that still moves.