Demolition under way at old Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois

HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill. (CBS) –An era has come to an end in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates, as crews on Thursday were working to tear down the old Sears, Roebuck and Co. corporate headquarters.

CBS News Skywatch flew the scene as crews began ripping apart the 2.4 million square-foot office building.

The property at 3333 Beverly Rd. in Hoffman Estates was acquired by Compass Datacenters in September of last year, and a new data center will be built on the site.

Sears first moved into the headquarters in 1992, after receiving a series of incentives—reportedly valued at $240 million—to lure the company to the sprawling suburban office park from its old corporate headquarters at the Sears Tower, now called the Willis Tower.

Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018, and the company formed to purchase its assets, Transformco, put the Hoffman Estates headquarters up for sale three years later.

Sears: A history intertwined with the history of Chicago

The roots of Sears, Roebuck and Co. date back to the 1880s in Chicago—when watch retailer Richard W. Sears and watch repairman Alvah C. Roebuck founded a mail-order company. Initially selling watches and jewelry, the Sears catalog quickly became an Amazon for the turn of the last century—selling, among many other things clothing, bicycles, sewing machines, sporting goods, musical instruments, and guns, the Sears archives website noted.

In 1895, clothing manufacturer Julius Rosenwald became a partner in Sears. Rosenwald is credited with bringing in the business strategies that sent Sears booming—with sales jumping from $750,000 to $50 million between 1895 and 1907, the Sears archive notes.

Rosenwald was also known for placing his focus on the customer, with the pledge of “satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back,” the Sears archive notes. He is also known for founding Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, and for his philanthropic efforts—notably including the establishment of thousands of schools for rural Black youth in the South.

Sears’ first retail store opened in 1925, under the leadership of Gen. Robert E. Wood, Brittanica notes. This store was at the Sears Merchandise Building at the company headquarters near Homan Avenue and Arthington Street on Chicago’s West Side.

Three more stores opened in Chicago 1928—at Lawrence and Wolcott avenues in Ravenswood, at 79th Street and Kenwood Avenue in Avalon Park, and at 62nd Street and Western Avenue in Chicago Lawn.

All these stores remained in business until relatively recent years. The Western Avenue and 79th Street stores both closed in 2013—the 79th Street store is now a self-storage facility, while the Western Avenue store was torn down in 2020. The Lawrence Avenue store closed in 2016 and has been redeveloped into apartments and a DeVry University campus.

Stores also quickly opened elsewhere around the country—and retail sales had outpaced mail-order sales by 1931, Brittanica noted. Sears benefited tremendously from an economic boom after World War II, and was not surpassed as the nation’s largest retailer until future parent store Kmart dethroned it in the 1980s, and Walmart later dethroned both, Brittanica noted.

In 1973, Sears moved into Chicago’s Sears Tower—which opened as the tallest building in the world. Nearly two decades later, Sears was offered the largest tax break ever for a company in Illinois to move to Hoffman Estates—a move that a 2020 Daily Herald and ProPublica review said did not pay off for the northwest suburban village as hoped.

Sears and Kmart merged in 2004. Published reports note that Sears hit a peak stock price of $195.18 a share in 2007, but then fell into decline—with the company no longer being profitable by 2010. Store after store closed around the country—with 1,250 locations left by the summer of 2017, compared with 3,400 at the beginning of 2006.

The last Illinois Sears store, at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, closed in November 2021. There are now only 11 Sears stores left.