41 ms·

Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

511 points by sonograph 5y ago

sonograph 5y ago
It is being demolished now. The company doing the demolition must be very proud of destroying things, because they make drone & time-lapsed videos of it: https://johlerdemolition.com/portfolio-items/motorola-schaumburg-illinois/ https://johlerdemolition.com/portfolio-items/motorola-schaum... Edit: I meant this in a positive tone, not a negative. I'm glad they take pride in their work.
- Swizec 5y ago
  It’s their job to destroy things, why wouldn’t they be proud? I’m proud too when I refactor bad code.
  - geodel 5y ago
    Deleted 5000 lines of code from a project yesterday! And I am feeling very good about it :)
    - _eht 5y ago
      I, too, delete entire projects!
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      One weird trick to increase code coverage.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    Are you proud enough to provide drone footage of the refactor?
    - rpcwork 5y ago
      Screen capture, Nope. Drone footage, yes!
    - TremendousJudge 5y ago
      sometimes I wish I could
- vikramkr 5y ago
  Why shouldn't they take pride in their work? Its honest and important work. Not every building can/should be preserved, tearing down these structures is important to remove dilapidated safety hazards and/or build something new
  - sonograph 5y ago
    I didn't mean it negatively. I wrote it with a smile. They should take pride in their work!
    - version_five 5y ago
      A few years ago they were demolishing a building across from my office. They had various demolition equipment, mainly big backhoes including some equipped with grabbing. They were taking their time ripping stuff apart, and then sorting through what they'd broken off to separate out all the rebar and other metal. What I liked was, at the end of each day, the crew lined up all the equipment and put each in what I would call a "majestic" pose, like with its arm looking purposeful. I thought it gave a cool, and professional look to the construction site, and showed they obviously cared about what they were doing, to clean up and pose the equipment, vs just leaving it where it was when the shift ended.
- thewebcount 5y ago
  Random tangent: This is the most bizarre thing I've seen in a while. At the bottom of the page is a "Protected by Recaptcha" logo that follows the page around. Clicking on it does nothing and no Recaptcha is displayed. What is it supposedly protecting and how is it doing that protecting if no Captcha is displayed? (I browse privately and am constantly hit with Captchas, but this one didn't prompt me.)
  - kccqzy 5y ago
    Recaptcha version 3 doesn't need to show you a CAPTCHA. It just calculates a score in the background, and of course it's up to the website to determine what to do with this score.
bigbillheck 5y ago
What an absolute waste.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  The Zurich building on the campus is pleasant on the eyes even thought they are a not so good employer, and they have a Top Golf now (some /s intended).
  - vidanay 5y ago
    The Zurich building looks like mega sized shipping containers. (I know - that is the intended design look). My aunt worked for Zuirich for almost 20 years (in the towers), never heard anything extraordinarily bad other than normal employee grumblings.
    - cestith 5y ago
      It's a great landmark from the freeway.
tomkat0789 5y ago
Even stranger is the abandoned Motorola complex built way out among the farmlands in Harvard, Illinois. Motorola has fallen far! When I started a job at a big company in a Chicago suburb, they actually asked for a show of hands "who's from Motorola" and like 17/20 people raised their hands!
- derekp7 5y ago
  So that Harvard facility -- from what I heard (when I worked for Moto) was that it was built for the main purpose to give to one of the Galvin family members to manage. They built it as an engineering and manufacturing center, and was expecting a bunch of engineers that worked at Libertyville to move out there. Problem is that was during the dot-com boom and people would rather get a different job then relocate to the middle of a corn field (actually a lot of people bought out in Crystal Lake, causing a housing boom there, which later collapsed when the Harvard building was shut down). Then they outsourced manufacturing (the phones were no longer bullet proof after the outsourcing / offshoring). So they made Harvard a distribution center. They were hoping to also be able to pull workers from Rockford, but that didn't really work out either. At one point, after Moto sold the building, an investor was going to turn it into the worlds largest indoor water park. That never panned out either.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  I assumed from the title that this would be the Harvard facility. I never would have dreamed that Schaumburg would be shut down as long as the brand existed. How wrong I was!
selfsimilar 5y ago
I grew up in a neighboring suburb to Schaumburg, and in junior high or high school in the late 80's early 90's I remember taking a field trip to the Motorola campus (as well as McDonald's Hamburger University!). Mostly I remember a showroom museum of sorts, where much of the early tech, military field radios I remember mostly, was on display. At the time I was underwhelmed, I think in part because I knew Motorola as a failing microprocessor company, but I was sad I didn't see what appeared to be that museum space in any of the pictures in the linked gallery.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  There are several drone videos on YouTube/Vimeo of that building, the Galvin Center, being demolished. Top Golf is there now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1aEJFTUmkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1aEJFTUmkg https://vimeo.com/308429582 https://vimeo.com/308429582 I find it fascinating how all the metal bits are carefully separated and stacked (using big hydraulic claws) for recycling.
- vidanay 5y ago
  Grew up in Arlington Heights a few years ahead of you. (RMHS '89). Heady days indeed.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Their micros remain one of the more successful parts of the business. Naturally they spun that off to avoid those annoying profits.
- kyrra 5y ago
  Hi former neighbor! For those that are wondering, here is the campus on maps: https://goo.gl/maps/WdHju125jSbmRbaS9 https://goo.gl/maps/WdHju125jSbmRbaS9. It looks like it's mostly been torn down now (streetview and satellite show it gone). I never visited the campus. My next door neighbor worked there (he was a big RF guy and had a a giant shortwave antenna on his roof). They also employed so many people that they had their own stoplights at their entrance/exit. Plus the city convinced them to do staggered start/end times for their employees as to not flood the roads around the building.
blunte 5y ago
Fascinating. Motorola has been part of some very significant things in history (not just because I'm multi-Amiga owner). From my outsider view, it seems the companies who really invest in R&D make the best things happen. Unfortunately the best doesn't always mean the most long term successful (depends on many many more factors than just the quality of the product). I would love to see a world where it was fashionable for companies to proudly devote 20+% to R&D. It seems instead like R&D is 2% at best, and marketing (or legal... patents) is 18%.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Motorola couldn't do software very well. And software became increasingly important in all the fields they competed in. It turned out to be easier to take a company that was great at software, and turn it into a cellphone company, rather than trying to take a cellphone company and make it great at software.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    In the case of Apple, I think it's especially a case of a company great at products. They did great because they had a great vision of the product.
  - ansible 5y ago
    Yes. Before the start of the smartphone revolution (circa 2005) the "smartphones" of the time are what we'd call flip-phones now. They were smart in the sense that they could run apps (J2ME, blech), take pictures and such. Moto had dozens of different models at any given point in time. All running various kinds of (what we'd call today) embedded operating systems, closer to what we'd class as a RTOS these days. Stuff like Symbian. Most / all of them were not that easy to do application development with. And none could really scale up in processing power (multi-core, which wasn't a thing back then), decent TCP/IP networking, and driving a large and complicated GUI. In one sense, as a leader in the cell phone business, they should have been well placed to make a big splash with smartphones. But none of their software on that side of things was able to transition to that, which is why they adopted Android. To their credit, they did produce some decent Android phones, but because they relied on Google, they were now also competing severely with HTC, Samsung, LG and others.
xattt 5y ago
I’ve been thinking in 50 or 100 years from now, will this be the case for the Apple Starship campus? I’m sure Motorola seemed indomitable at the time of its construction.
- WorldPeas 5y ago
  i'm not one to wish ill will, but that would be a wicked indoor gokart course
- caoilte 5y ago
  It's just as easy to imagine this being most of San Jose because of drought. Or this being every corporate HQ because of the collapse of Western Capitalism in the face of global warming. I'm sure life will go on though.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    Most likely global capitalism will thrive in the face of global warming. Creative destruction. All the infrastructure to be rebuilt, the huge projects, warlike government expenditures, replacing the worlds fleet of vehicles, expanding the grid multiple times. It will be absolutely Faustian… People were taking too much time between new cars
    - caoilte 5y ago
      This is fair. I wonder if that will require a new generation of corporation, though. And the current generation of corporate HQs don't look nearly defensible enough. Something more like the Tyrell Corporation Ziggurat will be needed.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    > It's just as easy to imagine this being most of San Jose because of drought. The non-agricultural, non-forestry parts of the California economy can do just fine on desalinated seawater.
mikewarot 5y ago
I had a friend who worked at Motorola back when they had acres of clean rooms... he said he always had to fight the urge to open one of the emergency exits, sneeze loudly into it, and then close the door. ;-)
jameshart 5y ago
I love the tone of this, it’s like the musings of an explorer who discovered a jungle city abandoned by a mysterious civilization. “there were old wall slogans inside that must have been added to motivate and inspire the employees” … “ the tall building had several brick structures on the lower main level. He suspected that those structures probably had plants and ferns in them so that important business clients and employees would be met with a pleasing sight upon entering.” … “Martin Gonzalez also noticed pictures of people using Motorola products that had been left on the walls of the building.” Indeed, the ways of the people of the Motorola civilization of around 2011CE are mysterious and strange to us. Perhaps the central atrium served some kind of ritual purpose? Were prisoners perhaps thrown off the upper balconies as a sacrifice to their gods? We will never really know.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Archaeologists have found inscriptions referring to the cult of "Six Sigma", which is hypothesized to be a primitive form of ritual statistical magic.
  - gumby 5y ago
    A wonderful example of the cargo cult phenomenon!
    - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
      Whatever that is...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - olivermarks 5y ago
    @pfdietz the battered remnants of the cult of "Six Sigma" looks strangely like post Soviet abandoned building triumphalist wall writings, albeit with western typography
    - 5y ago
geodel 5y ago
I used to live at International Village apartments near Moto headquarters. In those days MotoRazr craze starting to fade as IPhone was just launched. I remember layoffs were started and bunch of folks were laid off in teams I worked with.
yawnxyz 5y ago
This looks like a set piece from the game Control! If they ever filmed a movie version of that game (which they probably shouldn't, as it could never do the game justice), they should do it at that location...
- tuatoru 5y ago
  It also looks very like a building in the Amazon TV series "Homecoming".
dcroley 5y ago
I remember touring the museum there during a visit as a new employee in the early 90s. Only time I ever visited HQ.
Xophmeister 5y ago
They also have a former HQ on the outskirts of, IIRC, Swindon in the UK, which was/seemed abandoned for years. I was used in one of the Brosnan James Bond movies when it was first built.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  Yes it was in Swindon. The EMEA headquarters.
harshreality 5y ago
Reminds me of Bell Labs. https://www.abandonedamerica.us/bell-labs https://www.abandonedamerica.us/bell-labs
- lephty 5y ago
  At least that building has been re-imagined and revived as an office, entertainment, housing, dining hub. https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/ https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/ Not to its full, old glory, but at least it is not abandoned anymore.
bfrog 5y ago
Motorola is maybe a telling of how complacency and pure business leadership can lead to a downfall. They became complacent, they abandoned their technical leadership for bean counters, and became dust. Intel was almost going down that road.
- cestith 5y ago
  Motorola probably started slowly downhill after Lear left and Wavering retired.
- davidf560 5y ago
  I suppose it depends on how you define "downfall", but Motorola stock this year is at an all-time high, even higher than its peak during late 90s during the run up to the dot-com boom and when Motorola cellphones were king. There's been some very hard years in between and it's a smaller company now, but it's actually doing very well by many standards.
- caoilte 5y ago
  Not sure Intel have escaped that fate yet. Ditto Boeing.
matmann2001 5y ago
Now do the Libertyville office.
- cestith 5y ago
  How about the Quincy office, near where Wavering worked and near where he and Lear were each born before making the product that would be the name of the company? Even the last little local sales office closed years ago.
  - atdrummond 5y ago
    As in Quincy, IL? I grew up there and the town still hasn't recovered from the closure.
    - cestith 5y ago
      I moved down to Texas from Quincy about a decade ago. I lived most of my life before that in Hannibal and Quincy. There's a lot of business missing up there. Gardner Denver I think moved their HQ several years ago but kept the plant. Moormans sold. Quincy Soybean still has some work there but sold and closed the HQ. Building Technolgoies closed in Hannibal in the 80s. They never rebuilt the grain elevator at Hannibal after the 1993 flood. Buckhorn Rubber closed about a year ago. They never rebuilt the trainyard at West Quincy after the '93 flood either. I'm not sure if Harris still builds broadcast equipment there or not. I think Knapheide and Hollister Whitney are still doing well.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  The Libertyville office is now an "innovation center". I think the manufacturing floor is being used to make EV chargers by a company based in Amsterdam. https://www.iparkcampus.com/available-space/ https://www.iparkcampus.com/available-space/
AlbertCory 5y ago
It's amazing that neither the article nor any of the comments so far mention that Google bought part of Motorola, for its 10,000 patents. Then sold it a few years later. I was in Google Patents and I interviewed people for the position of "acquirer of patents." This was a period when they actually thought the "throw weight" of your patent portfolio really mattered in cross-licensing deals. Most of those patents were utterly worthless in any sort of deal.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  I remember reading about that! Strange times.
- alexchro93 5y ago
  My dad worked for a division of Motorola that was bought by Google and it sure felt like, during that time, if you were working for Motorola you could be laid off at a moment's notice. Google stock was eventually included in his compensation package, though. I can imagine that eased some of the worry.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Precursor to the NFT craze..
- DerekL 5y ago
  It's not relevant to the article, which is about real estate. Also, the article mentions the split into two companies. Google bought Motorola Mobility, but the headquarters went to Motorola Solutions.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  > This was a period when they actually thought the "throw weight" of your patent portfolio really mattered in cross-licensing deals. Most of those patents were utterly worthless in any sort of deal. Could anyone expand on this? Sounds interesting, and I know little about it.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
squarefoot 5y ago
Brought to mind the famous video by Dave Haynie about the last days of Commodore and their then almost empty fab in West Chester, PA, just days before the bankruptcy ended it all. If you want an account on how it feels when it's happening, that's probably the video to watch. Contains some interesting vintage technical stuff too. As an old Amiga user, It makes me both sad and angry every time I watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI
vizzier 5y ago
If you like this sort of thing. Bright Sun Films[1] on youtube does a lot of the same abandoned investigation content. Often digging a bit into the history of why something was abandoned in the first place. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5k3Kc0avyDJ2nG9Kxm9JmQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5k3Kc0avyDJ2nG9Kxm9JmQ
robertlagrant 5y ago
I feel a bit silly now that I always thought Motorola was an Asian company.
- belval 5y ago
  Glad I am not the only one, for some reason I assumed it was Japanese. I think it's because the name really doesn't sound American at all.
  - yborg 5y ago
    According to company legend, the name was a combination of "Motor" and "Victrola"; the company founder Paul Galvin made some of the earliest car radios, and the Victrola brand name was well-known at the time for its phonographs.
- Cd00d 5y ago
  I had assumed it was European. I put it next to Qualcomm. Now that I fact check myself, Qualcomm isn't based in Scandinavia like I thought, but rather San Diego. I guess I just mix all hot-hardware companies of the '90s in with Ericsson! What next??
- DerekL 5y ago
  Well, part of it is now. Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo.
_moof 5y ago
If you find any 68040s in there, gimme.
sharken 5y ago
It's eerily similar to pictures from Chernobyl or Fukushima, although without the radiation. Here are some pictures from Fukushima: https://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima-8-years-on/ https://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima-8-years-on/
nharada 5y ago
Super interesting. I grew up in a nearby suburb and when I was younger Motorola was THE company in the area. It felt like nearly all of my friend's parents were employees. It's amazing how quickly they fell off.
Jun8 5y ago
The main building was known as IL02, this is where I had my first job interview (the Blue Conference Room!) and afterwards joined Motorola Labs in 2004. The tall building shown was called the Sector Tower, a lot of money was spent renovating it. My colleagues and I would walk up the 6 floors and down after lunch for exercise. Mot Labs had 1000+ people around the world when I joined, was down to ~30 in 2010. How the times change.
Taylor_OD 5y ago
This is very interested. Many careers were started, built, and ended there. Many fond and not so fond memories formed there. Now its wasting away.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
Sorry for the expression but "holy shit!". I worked in Motorola for 10 years from the late 90's. I was based in Europe but travelled to Schaumburg every two months or so (or to Phoenix). It is really a shock to see this place abandoned - last time I was there (15 years ago) it was very much alive. It has been a long time since I had such a nostalgic squeeze of heart.
- davidf560 5y ago
  The whole story as presented in the article and comments here is a bit misleading. None of these buildings were "abandoned", at least not in any practical sense. The buildings documented here were old (from the 70s I believe) and full of asbestos and things like that and had really outlived their usefulness, and the very large piece of land they occupied had become extremely valuable. The buildings were still fully occupied when the company decided to sell the campus and relocate to new headquarters in downtown Chicago and move manufacturing to a new facility in Elgin. Once sold, the company moved out. Shortly after, demolition began, and that's when these pictures were taken. The damage is from demolition, not from the normal "abandoned for 10 years deterioration" you see on those Urban Explorer Youtube videos. People worked in these buildings just a few years ago, and a lot of them had been remodeled somewhat recently and were actually pretty nice inside. The 6-story building with the large atrium was newer than the other parts and is still there and the new owner/developer is hoping to continue to use it as an office building (last I heard anyway). Motorola also still occupies the 14-story building that used to be the world headquarters as well as another large building on the property. The real story here is much more mundane: a big company sold off some valuable real estate as part of a move to chase a younger workforce in downtown Chicago (jury's still out on that decision, especially with a more WFH-focused future).
- arbuge 5y ago
  Similar reaction here. I was an intern there for a couple summers in the late 90s. At the time it was full of life and activity - all the hallmarks of a successful corporation. Never imagined seeing it in this state.
  - 5y ago
ChuckMcM 5y ago
I can't help but feel sad for the loss of engineering innovation. Yes, the pieces of Motorola live on, but there is a certain magic when there are a lot of big pieces working together (like radios, semiconductors, entertainment, Etc)
pm90 5y ago
> On the business and entertainment side of things, there will be Top Golf, restaurants, a hotel, and a shopping and entertainment center, all serviced by parking lots to encourage visitors from further afield. The area also hopes to offer concerts, movies, and ice-skating. A similar thing happened to the IBM campus in Austin. "The Domain" is essentially land that was formerly owned by IBM. I believe there are plans to further develop the remaining site as well. I found this particular statement really funny, as there's a Top Golf adjacent to the current IBM Austin site.
jrexilius 5y ago
Ugh. That hurts my soul. I used to work there in the late 90s at its peak. door 13. good place, amazing engineers. So sad.
yalogin 5y ago
I still remember the shock I felt when I saw this complex empty after the recession. That kind of help sync the extent of the recession for me.
MacroChip 5y ago
I love the planters inside. Especially in the big open space. Does anyone know any names for the architecture and design choices of that building?
airocker 5y ago
I was a junior employee at Mot as my first job in the worst period: 2006-2007. I saw someone in his 50s who had been in Mot forever been shown the door very impolitely. We also saw the team in Urbana Champaign let go because of some differences with the upper management at that time. It was possibly the most crucial team to compete with Apple. The environment was crazy with layoffs every three months and you can imagine what would have been going on there. We used to hear about the big sales parties in foreign locations when all of this was going on. Would have loved to know if the CEO at that time had better options.
javier10e6 5y ago
Reminds me of Kodak Eastman Business Park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Business_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Business_Park Just visiting Wikipedia found out that they weapon grade Uranium in an underground lab... yikes!
xwdv 5y ago
The lack of people leads me to conclude these are actually screenshots from Unreal Engine.
calcsam 5y ago
"And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains."
mml 5y ago
heh, I worked a the schaumburg HQ in the mid 90s. We had awful problems getting java applets to print cellphone invoices in a ms/sun compatible way. Many thanks to the anonymous coworker who taught me the dot operation in vi there.
fencepost 5y ago
For current status, most or all of the removal is complete - I think there's one empty building that I'm not sure about the plans for. Counterclockwise from the northwest the credit union is long gone (now "Andigo" and on Meacham) though I think the building is still there, there are some nice looking (and pricey!) apartments along the west side, then there's Top Golf at the southwest corner (which has been in operation for quite some time - pretty sure they were open before the pandemic). South center of the property along the expressway is the area still owned and occupied by a Motorola company. There's Zurich America at the southeast corner, which was the first new construction on the campus several years ago, and another new building ("B") just north and a little west of it that appears finished but I'm not sure it's actually occupied yet - I rarely drive by there during business hours. The east and northeast parts aren't really developed yet, but they're doing a lot of work on the roads around there (Algonquin and Meacham). There's an area of (I think) condos still under construction on the north side along Algonquin, the westernmost buildings are already occupied and they're working east at a pretty decent clip. In the center of the complex is the "B" building mentioned above, as well as the remaining unoccupied old Motorola property. There's also other construction in the area - one new apartment complex on Algonquin a bit west that's been there for a couple years, IIRC built on vacant land. The single-story office complex directly northwest of the campus was partially removed and is under construction for a new set of luxury apartments or condos, the western half of that complex is also for sale and I wouldn't be surprised to see it torn down and built on soon as well. My biggest disappointment about the whole thing is that once upon a time there was possibly going to be something called the STAR line, basically a commuter rail line built in the center of 90 running from O'Hare out to Elgin then south. I had dreams of them turning part of the Moto campus into a station and parking for that - would have been great for Schaumburg a decade or two back by providing easy access to the core of Schaumburg's shopping areas when malls were still highly relevant.
didip 5y ago
Many years down the road, will currently famous Silicon Valley headquarters suffer the same fate?
sergiotapia 5y ago
This is exactly why I love the Dark Souls series. They show a world long past it's time. Just enough detail to give you a glimpse of what life was like back in it's prime but not enough to ruin the melancholy. Beautiful!
sintezcs 5y ago
https://www.instagram.com/lanasator/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/lanasator/?hl=en I recommend Lana’s Instagram. A really fascinating and scary at the same time pics of soviet abandoned building and industrial places.
spc476 5y ago
I recall when IBM left Boca Raton, Florida (where the PC was invented) in the mid-90s. About a year after they left, a few friends and I roamed the abandoned IBM facility [1] and it was odd seeing empty computer rooms sans the raised floors. Some of the resulting pits were six feet deep (2m). Crazy. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/CKrEbTkRDwWQNc2d8 https://goo.gl/maps/CKrEbTkRDwWQNc2d8 Yes, it's a huge hexagon shaped building.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  This is over by Florida Atlantic University, originally built to be a lot harder to get into than most well-known institutions at the time. Didn't offer much undergraduate, just upper level only for top transfer students. Things have changed, the campus plus the airport were a former airbase carved out of the wilderness and used during the Cuban Missle Crisis. Boca was a small resort town on the coast and you had to go way west of town into the boonies before you came upon FAU out in the woods. Go much further west and it was basically everglades after that. One summer as a teenager a buddy and myself were riding horses about that far west of Boca Lake. Nothing but pines & palmettos for miles, it would not be fun to try and hike it because you need to be up on the horse to see over the palmettos. But this was not like any other summer. We came upon an unfamiliar clearing. As we got closer it loomed larger, it was zero vegetation, nothing but dirt with the rest of the woods still there as a wall on the other side of the field. We rode on out into the cleared land, this was no farm, you could see for miles to the north and south, yes we were in the middle of I-95 on horses, but no worries we were the earliest passenger traffic and there was no pavement or any way to get there by car yet. Well when they built the IBM location it was widely known to be for secret projects, so it was recognized to be appropriate for it to be like the Pentagon, except of course a hexagon instead. My grandma wanted me to work there, some of her clients knew some of the secrets, she was a fortune-teller. I went to the university instead.
  - spc476 5y ago
    I too went to FAU, but by the time I attended (late 80s/early 90s) they had an undergraduate program in Computer Science. It's odd to think of FAU as being "way west" as it's less than two miles from the ocean and about 2.5 miles from downtown Boca Raton. It's built up since it sounds like you were there last---you now have to drive about 12 miles from shore to get to the Everglades.
khazhoux 5y ago
Startup idea: Airbnb for zombies. Buy up abandoned spaces like this, lease them to the undead horde. Payment might be a problem, as brains are not readily convertible to legal tender (perhaps BTC can help here?). Zombnb.
omoikane 5y ago
Link to the original album for people who just want the pics: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/72157712153499371 https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/7215771215...
petecooper 5y ago
See also https://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/ https://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/ for more of this type of thing.
H8crilA 5y ago
Bill Gates said that tech companies deserve higher risk premia due to the risk of technological obsolescence (which in short means lower equity price for the same projected future earnings). This story is a good example, IBM is another. Funny to contemplate that given the current prices of tech equity, both private and public.
wirthjason 5y ago
This is awesome. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs close to here. I always wondered what it was like on the inside. It’s eerie to see it in ruins. I imagine what energy it would have in its heyday.
peterburkimsher 5y ago
If you're interested in abandoned buildings and other artistic captures of the darker side of society, check out Artemy Lebedev - a Russian traveller who's been to pretty much everywhere in the world. https://www.tema.ru/eng/travel/ https://www.tema.ru/eng/travel/
luke2m 5y ago
I used to live down the road from moto headquarters and always wondered what it was like inside. This was very enlightening.
nimbius 5y ago
>it’s like the musings of an explorer who discovered a jungle city abandoned by a mysterious civilization Disclosure: I have worked in construction. I dont mean to get too off topic but please dont do this. Wandering abandoned buildings is very dangerous. Roofs and stairs can collapse seemingly for no reason, exposed floor tile can release asbestos, and dry bathrooms without water in the pipes can expose you to potentially lethal concentrations of sewer gasses like methane and hydrogen sulfide that build up in enclosed restrooms with no power to ventilation systems. If a fire starts, most emergency exits will be barracaded.
- porknubbins 5y ago
  The possible danger is part of the appeal though isn't it? We let people go cave diving and mountain climbing. I mean I'm not advocating for just anyone to go in structurally unsound buildings, trespassing is illegal for a good reason, but part of me appreciates the human curiosity of wanting to see what is inside areas that have been abandoned. Whether its the Paris catacombs, the NY subway tunnels, or a factory in Detroit there is often a good story in the remains.
nsynet 5y ago
Motorola is now a brand of Lenovo ,which is a Chinese company, and Motorola smart phone is also developed in Beijing of China, and producted in Wuhan ,maybe any other city of China. Motorola is still alive, in another formal.
- LQexplanation 5y ago
  The radio and emergency services part of company never went anywhere and it's now Motorola Solutions.
tablespoon 5y ago
> UrbanStreet Group and Antunovich Associates set up a joint venture called Veridian which would transform this abandoned site into a thriving urban center. It is anticipated that the first stage of this project will be completed in the fall of 2020. Veridian Dynamics?
porknubbins 5y ago
We are one and a half years into mass work from home and the idea that everyone in a company would need to jump in their cars and rush to appear on an office floor at 9:00am or something already (finally) seems completely ridiculous. Its like some Jetsons type bad sci-fi fantasy of how the future will work- as if the environment just becomes aesthetically more futuristic while the underlying social patterns are still set in the 1950s.
gfiorav 5y ago
The thing I love most of these is how ridiculous the “company culture” looks on those abandoned walls. Like the awards and recognitions in the cabinets that no one bothered to take with them. How utterly useless those are to company culture is made evident by how pathetic they look now, just left behind and meaningless.
benjaminwootton 5y ago
What a wonderful website. Just spent the last 3 hours reading the different stories. Like a walk through history.
indiantinker 5y ago
"The future of workplace"
malwrar 5y ago
This building has a special place in my heart. My dad used to work here when I was growing up and would take me there occasionally. I remember going between cubicles and asking people what they were doing, learning to make simple circuits in one of the labs there (simple stuff though, like hooking a battery up to a motor), and generally being fascinated by how fun of a job that looked to be and meeting the sorts of people who did it. I guess it was a good formative experience considering what I ended up choosing as my childhood hobby and later my job! Super weird to see this place again, sad to see what happened to it.
scottmcdot 5y ago
This building is similar to that in the second series of Homecoming.
garfieldnate 5y ago
Looks like a great parkour spot!
RobKohr 5y ago
I feel that in 5 years, abandonedspaces is going to have a lot of locations to cover.

511 points by sonograph 5y ago

It is being demolished now. The company doing the demolition must be very proud of destroying things, because they make drone & time-lapsed videos of it: https://johlerdemolition.com/portfolio-items/motorola-schaumburg-illinois/ https://johlerdemolition.com/portfolio-items/motorola-schaum... Edit: I meant this in a positive tone, not a negative. I'm glad they take pride in their work.

Swizec 5y ago
It’s their job to destroy things, why wouldn’t they be proud? I’m proud too when I refactor bad code.
- geodel 5y ago
  Deleted 5000 lines of code from a project yesterday! And I am feeling very good about it :)
  - _eht 5y ago
    I, too, delete entire projects!
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    One weird trick to increase code coverage.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  Are you proud enough to provide drone footage of the refactor?
  - rpcwork 5y ago
    Screen capture, Nope. Drone footage, yes!
  - TremendousJudge 5y ago
    sometimes I wish I could
vikramkr 5y ago
Why shouldn't they take pride in their work? Its honest and important work. Not every building can/should be preserved, tearing down these structures is important to remove dilapidated safety hazards and/or build something new
- sonograph 5y ago
  I didn't mean it negatively. I wrote it with a smile. They should take pride in their work!
  - version_five 5y ago
    A few years ago they were demolishing a building across from my office. They had various demolition equipment, mainly big backhoes including some equipped with grabbing. They were taking their time ripping stuff apart, and then sorting through what they'd broken off to separate out all the rebar and other metal. What I liked was, at the end of each day, the crew lined up all the equipment and put each in what I would call a "majestic" pose, like with its arm looking purposeful. I thought it gave a cool, and professional look to the construction site, and showed they obviously cared about what they were doing, to clean up and pose the equipment, vs just leaving it where it was when the shift ended.
thewebcount 5y ago
Random tangent: This is the most bizarre thing I've seen in a while. At the bottom of the page is a "Protected by Recaptcha" logo that follows the page around. Clicking on it does nothing and no Recaptcha is displayed. What is it supposedly protecting and how is it doing that protecting if no Captcha is displayed? (I browse privately and am constantly hit with Captchas, but this one didn't prompt me.)
- kccqzy 5y ago
  Recaptcha version 3 doesn't need to show you a CAPTCHA. It just calculates a score in the background, and of course it's up to the website to determine what to do with this score.

bigbillheck 5y ago

What an absolute waste.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
The Zurich building on the campus is pleasant on the eyes even thought they are a not so good employer, and they have a Top Golf now (some /s intended).
- vidanay 5y ago
  The Zurich building looks like mega sized shipping containers. (I know - that is the intended design look). My aunt worked for Zuirich for almost 20 years (in the towers), never heard anything extraordinarily bad other than normal employee grumblings.
  - cestith 5y ago
    It's a great landmark from the freeway.

tomkat0789 5y ago

Even stranger is the abandoned Motorola complex built way out among the farmlands in Harvard, Illinois. Motorola has fallen far! When I started a job at a big company in a Chicago suburb, they actually asked for a show of hands "who's from Motorola" and like 17/20 people raised their hands!

derekp7 5y ago
So that Harvard facility -- from what I heard (when I worked for Moto) was that it was built for the main purpose to give to one of the Galvin family members to manage. They built it as an engineering and manufacturing center, and was expecting a bunch of engineers that worked at Libertyville to move out there. Problem is that was during the dot-com boom and people would rather get a different job then relocate to the middle of a corn field (actually a lot of people bought out in Crystal Lake, causing a housing boom there, which later collapsed when the Harvard building was shut down). Then they outsourced manufacturing (the phones were no longer bullet proof after the outsourcing / offshoring). So they made Harvard a distribution center. They were hoping to also be able to pull workers from Rockford, but that didn't really work out either. At one point, after Moto sold the building, an investor was going to turn it into the worlds largest indoor water park. That never panned out either.
wyldfire 5y ago
I assumed from the title that this would be the Harvard facility. I never would have dreamed that Schaumburg would be shut down as long as the brand existed. How wrong I was!

selfsimilar 5y ago

I grew up in a neighboring suburb to Schaumburg, and in junior high or high school in the late 80's early 90's I remember taking a field trip to the Motorola campus (as well as McDonald's Hamburger University!). Mostly I remember a showroom museum of sorts, where much of the early tech, military field radios I remember mostly, was on display. At the time I was underwhelmed, I think in part because I knew Motorola as a failing microprocessor company, but I was sad I didn't see what appeared to be that museum space in any of the pictures in the linked gallery.

pfdietz 5y ago
There are several drone videos on YouTube/Vimeo of that building, the Galvin Center, being demolished. Top Golf is there now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1aEJFTUmkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1aEJFTUmkg https://vimeo.com/308429582 https://vimeo.com/308429582 I find it fascinating how all the metal bits are carefully separated and stacked (using big hydraulic claws) for recycling.
vidanay 5y ago
Grew up in Arlington Heights a few years ahead of you. (RMHS '89). Heady days indeed.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Their micros remain one of the more successful parts of the business. Naturally they spun that off to avoid those annoying profits.
kyrra 5y ago
Hi former neighbor! For those that are wondering, here is the campus on maps: https://goo.gl/maps/WdHju125jSbmRbaS9 https://goo.gl/maps/WdHju125jSbmRbaS9. It looks like it's mostly been torn down now (streetview and satellite show it gone). I never visited the campus. My next door neighbor worked there (he was a big RF guy and had a a giant shortwave antenna on his roof). They also employed so many people that they had their own stoplights at their entrance/exit. Plus the city convinced them to do staggered start/end times for their employees as to not flood the roads around the building.

blunte 5y ago

Fascinating. Motorola has been part of some very significant things in history (not just because I'm multi-Amiga owner). From my outsider view, it seems the companies who really invest in R&D make the best things happen. Unfortunately the best doesn't always mean the most long term successful (depends on many many more factors than just the quality of the product). I would love to see a world where it was fashionable for companies to proudly devote 20+% to R&D. It seems instead like R&D is 2% at best, and marketing (or legal... patents) is 18%.

pfdietz 5y ago
Motorola couldn't do software very well. And software became increasingly important in all the fields they competed in. It turned out to be easier to take a company that was great at software, and turn it into a cellphone company, rather than trying to take a cellphone company and make it great at software.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  In the case of Apple, I think it's especially a case of a company great at products. They did great because they had a great vision of the product.
- ansible 5y ago
  Yes. Before the start of the smartphone revolution (circa 2005) the "smartphones" of the time are what we'd call flip-phones now. They were smart in the sense that they could run apps (J2ME, blech), take pictures and such. Moto had dozens of different models at any given point in time. All running various kinds of (what we'd call today) embedded operating systems, closer to what we'd class as a RTOS these days. Stuff like Symbian. Most / all of them were not that easy to do application development with. And none could really scale up in processing power (multi-core, which wasn't a thing back then), decent TCP/IP networking, and driving a large and complicated GUI. In one sense, as a leader in the cell phone business, they should have been well placed to make a big splash with smartphones. But none of their software on that side of things was able to transition to that, which is why they adopted Android. To their credit, they did produce some decent Android phones, but because they relied on Google, they were now also competing severely with HTC, Samsung, LG and others.

xattt 5y ago

I’ve been thinking in 50 or 100 years from now, will this be the case for the Apple Starship campus? I’m sure Motorola seemed indomitable at the time of its construction.

WorldPeas 5y ago
i'm not one to wish ill will, but that would be a wicked indoor gokart course
caoilte 5y ago
It's just as easy to imagine this being most of San Jose because of drought. Or this being every corporate HQ because of the collapse of Western Capitalism in the face of global warming. I'm sure life will go on though.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  Most likely global capitalism will thrive in the face of global warming. Creative destruction. All the infrastructure to be rebuilt, the huge projects, warlike government expenditures, replacing the worlds fleet of vehicles, expanding the grid multiple times. It will be absolutely Faustian… People were taking too much time between new cars
  - caoilte 5y ago
    This is fair. I wonder if that will require a new generation of corporation, though. And the current generation of corporate HQs don't look nearly defensible enough. Something more like the Tyrell Corporation Ziggurat will be needed.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > It's just as easy to imagine this being most of San Jose because of drought. The non-agricultural, non-forestry parts of the California economy can do just fine on desalinated seawater.

mikewarot 5y ago

I had a friend who worked at Motorola back when they had acres of clean rooms... he said he always had to fight the urge to open one of the emergency exits, sneeze loudly into it, and then close the door. ;-)

jameshart 5y ago

I love the tone of this, it’s like the musings of an explorer who discovered a jungle city abandoned by a mysterious civilization. “there were old wall slogans inside that must have been added to motivate and inspire the employees” … “ the tall building had several brick structures on the lower main level. He suspected that those structures probably had plants and ferns in them so that important business clients and employees would be met with a pleasing sight upon entering.” … “Martin Gonzalez also noticed pictures of people using Motorola products that had been left on the walls of the building.” Indeed, the ways of the people of the Motorola civilization of around 2011CE are mysterious and strange to us. Perhaps the central atrium served some kind of ritual purpose? Were prisoners perhaps thrown off the upper balconies as a sacrifice to their gods? We will never really know.

pfdietz 5y ago
Archaeologists have found inscriptions referring to the cult of "Six Sigma", which is hypothesized to be a primitive form of ritual statistical magic.
- gumby 5y ago
  A wonderful example of the cargo cult phenomenon!
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    Whatever that is...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- olivermarks 5y ago
  @pfdietz the battered remnants of the cult of "Six Sigma" looks strangely like post Soviet abandoned building triumphalist wall writings, albeit with western typography
  - 5y ago

geodel 5y ago

I used to live at International Village apartments near Moto headquarters. In those days MotoRazr craze starting to fade as IPhone was just launched. I remember layoffs were started and bunch of folks were laid off in teams I worked with.

yawnxyz 5y ago

This looks like a set piece from the game Control! If they ever filmed a movie version of that game (which they probably shouldn't, as it could never do the game justice), they should do it at that location...

tuatoru 5y ago
It also looks very like a building in the Amazon TV series "Homecoming".

dcroley 5y ago

I remember touring the museum there during a visit as a new employee in the early 90s. Only time I ever visited HQ.

Xophmeister 5y ago

They also have a former HQ on the outskirts of, IIRC, Swindon in the UK, which was/seemed abandoned for years. I was used in one of the Brosnan James Bond movies when it was first built.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago
Yes it was in Swindon. The EMEA headquarters.

harshreality 5y ago

Reminds me of Bell Labs. https://www.abandonedamerica.us/bell-labs https://www.abandonedamerica.us/bell-labs

lephty 5y ago
At least that building has been re-imagined and revived as an office, entertainment, housing, dining hub. https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/ https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/ Not to its full, old glory, but at least it is not abandoned anymore.

bfrog 5y ago

Motorola is maybe a telling of how complacency and pure business leadership can lead to a downfall. They became complacent, they abandoned their technical leadership for bean counters, and became dust. Intel was almost going down that road.

cestith 5y ago
Motorola probably started slowly downhill after Lear left and Wavering retired.
davidf560 5y ago
I suppose it depends on how you define "downfall", but Motorola stock this year is at an all-time high, even higher than its peak during late 90s during the run up to the dot-com boom and when Motorola cellphones were king. There's been some very hard years in between and it's a smaller company now, but it's actually doing very well by many standards.
caoilte 5y ago
Not sure Intel have escaped that fate yet. Ditto Boeing.

matmann2001 5y ago

Now do the Libertyville office.

cestith 5y ago
How about the Quincy office, near where Wavering worked and near where he and Lear were each born before making the product that would be the name of the company? Even the last little local sales office closed years ago.
- atdrummond 5y ago
  As in Quincy, IL? I grew up there and the town still hasn't recovered from the closure.
  - cestith 5y ago
    I moved down to Texas from Quincy about a decade ago. I lived most of my life before that in Hannibal and Quincy. There's a lot of business missing up there. Gardner Denver I think moved their HQ several years ago but kept the plant. Moormans sold. Quincy Soybean still has some work there but sold and closed the HQ. Building Technolgoies closed in Hannibal in the 80s. They never rebuilt the grain elevator at Hannibal after the 1993 flood. Buckhorn Rubber closed about a year ago. They never rebuilt the trainyard at West Quincy after the '93 flood either. I'm not sure if Harris still builds broadcast equipment there or not. I think Knapheide and Hollister Whitney are still doing well.
OldHand2018 5y ago
The Libertyville office is now an "innovation center". I think the manufacturing floor is being used to make EV chargers by a company based in Amsterdam. https://www.iparkcampus.com/available-space/ https://www.iparkcampus.com/available-space/

AlbertCory 5y ago

It's amazing that neither the article nor any of the comments so far mention that Google bought part of Motorola, for its 10,000 patents. Then sold it a few years later. I was in Google Patents and I interviewed people for the position of "acquirer of patents." This was a period when they actually thought the "throw weight" of your patent portfolio really mattered in cross-licensing deals. Most of those patents were utterly worthless in any sort of deal.

robertlagrant 5y ago
I remember reading about that! Strange times.
alexchro93 5y ago
My dad worked for a division of Motorola that was bought by Google and it sure felt like, during that time, if you were working for Motorola you could be laid off at a moment's notice. Google stock was eventually included in his compensation package, though. I can imagine that eased some of the worry.
dboreham 5y ago
Precursor to the NFT craze..
DerekL 5y ago
It's not relevant to the article, which is about real estate. Also, the article mentions the split into two companies. Google bought Motorola Mobility, but the headquarters went to Motorola Solutions.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
> This was a period when they actually thought the "throw weight" of your patent portfolio really mattered in cross-licensing deals. Most of those patents were utterly worthless in any sort of deal. Could anyone expand on this? Sounds interesting, and I know little about it.
- AlbertCory 5y ago

squarefoot 5y ago

Brought to mind the famous video by Dave Haynie about the last days of Commodore and their then almost empty fab in West Chester, PA, just days before the bankruptcy ended it all. If you want an account on how it feels when it's happening, that's probably the video to watch. Contains some interesting vintage technical stuff too. As an old Amiga user, It makes me both sad and angry every time I watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI

vizzier 5y ago

If you like this sort of thing. Bright Sun Films[1] on youtube does a lot of the same abandoned investigation content. Often digging a bit into the history of why something was abandoned in the first place. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5k3Kc0avyDJ2nG9Kxm9JmQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5k3Kc0avyDJ2nG9Kxm9JmQ

robertlagrant 5y ago

I feel a bit silly now that I always thought Motorola was an Asian company.

belval 5y ago
Glad I am not the only one, for some reason I assumed it was Japanese. I think it's because the name really doesn't sound American at all.
- yborg 5y ago
  According to company legend, the name was a combination of "Motor" and "Victrola"; the company founder Paul Galvin made some of the earliest car radios, and the Victrola brand name was well-known at the time for its phonographs.
Cd00d 5y ago
I had assumed it was European. I put it next to Qualcomm. Now that I fact check myself, Qualcomm isn't based in Scandinavia like I thought, but rather San Diego. I guess I just mix all hot-hardware companies of the '90s in with Ericsson! What next??
DerekL 5y ago
Well, part of it is now. Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo.

_moof 5y ago

If you find any 68040s in there, gimme.

sharken 5y ago

It's eerily similar to pictures from Chernobyl or Fukushima, although without the radiation. Here are some pictures from Fukushima: https://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima-8-years-on/ https://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima-8-years-on/

nharada 5y ago

Super interesting. I grew up in a nearby suburb and when I was younger Motorola was THE company in the area. It felt like nearly all of my friend's parents were employees. It's amazing how quickly they fell off.

Jun8 5y ago

The main building was known as IL02, this is where I had my first job interview (the Blue Conference Room!) and afterwards joined Motorola Labs in 2004. The tall building shown was called the Sector Tower, a lot of money was spent renovating it. My colleagues and I would walk up the 6 floors and down after lunch for exercise. Mot Labs had 1000+ people around the world when I joined, was down to ~30 in 2010. How the times change.

Taylor_OD 5y ago

This is very interested. Many careers were started, built, and ended there. Many fond and not so fond memories formed there. Now its wasting away.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

Sorry for the expression but "holy shit!". I worked in Motorola for 10 years from the late 90's. I was based in Europe but travelled to Schaumburg every two months or so (or to Phoenix). It is really a shock to see this place abandoned - last time I was there (15 years ago) it was very much alive. It has been a long time since I had such a nostalgic squeeze of heart.

davidf560 5y ago
The whole story as presented in the article and comments here is a bit misleading. None of these buildings were "abandoned", at least not in any practical sense. The buildings documented here were old (from the 70s I believe) and full of asbestos and things like that and had really outlived their usefulness, and the very large piece of land they occupied had become extremely valuable. The buildings were still fully occupied when the company decided to sell the campus and relocate to new headquarters in downtown Chicago and move manufacturing to a new facility in Elgin. Once sold, the company moved out. Shortly after, demolition began, and that's when these pictures were taken. The damage is from demolition, not from the normal "abandoned for 10 years deterioration" you see on those Urban Explorer Youtube videos. People worked in these buildings just a few years ago, and a lot of them had been remodeled somewhat recently and were actually pretty nice inside. The 6-story building with the large atrium was newer than the other parts and is still there and the new owner/developer is hoping to continue to use it as an office building (last I heard anyway). Motorola also still occupies the 14-story building that used to be the world headquarters as well as another large building on the property. The real story here is much more mundane: a big company sold off some valuable real estate as part of a move to chase a younger workforce in downtown Chicago (jury's still out on that decision, especially with a more WFH-focused future).
arbuge 5y ago
Similar reaction here. I was an intern there for a couple summers in the late 90s. At the time it was full of life and activity - all the hallmarks of a successful corporation. Never imagined seeing it in this state.
- 5y ago

ChuckMcM 5y ago

I can't help but feel sad for the loss of engineering innovation. Yes, the pieces of Motorola live on, but there is a certain magic when there are a lot of big pieces working together (like radios, semiconductors, entertainment, Etc)

pm90 5y ago

> On the business and entertainment side of things, there will be Top Golf, restaurants, a hotel, and a shopping and entertainment center, all serviced by parking lots to encourage visitors from further afield. The area also hopes to offer concerts, movies, and ice-skating. A similar thing happened to the IBM campus in Austin. "The Domain" is essentially land that was formerly owned by IBM. I believe there are plans to further develop the remaining site as well. I found this particular statement really funny, as there's a Top Golf adjacent to the current IBM Austin site.

jrexilius 5y ago

Ugh. That hurts my soul. I used to work there in the late 90s at its peak. door 13. good place, amazing engineers. So sad.

yalogin 5y ago

I still remember the shock I felt when I saw this complex empty after the recession. That kind of help sync the extent of the recession for me.

MacroChip 5y ago

I love the planters inside. Especially in the big open space. Does anyone know any names for the architecture and design choices of that building?

airocker 5y ago

I was a junior employee at Mot as my first job in the worst period: 2006-2007. I saw someone in his 50s who had been in Mot forever been shown the door very impolitely. We also saw the team in Urbana Champaign let go because of some differences with the upper management at that time. It was possibly the most crucial team to compete with Apple. The environment was crazy with layoffs every three months and you can imagine what would have been going on there. We used to hear about the big sales parties in foreign locations when all of this was going on. Would have loved to know if the CEO at that time had better options.

javier10e6 5y ago

Reminds me of Kodak Eastman Business Park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Business_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Business_Park Just visiting Wikipedia found out that they weapon grade Uranium in an underground lab... yikes!

xwdv 5y ago

The lack of people leads me to conclude these are actually screenshots from Unreal Engine.

calcsam 5y ago

"And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains."

mml 5y ago

heh, I worked a the schaumburg HQ in the mid 90s. We had awful problems getting java applets to print cellphone invoices in a ms/sun compatible way. Many thanks to the anonymous coworker who taught me the dot operation in vi there.

fencepost 5y ago

For current status, most or all of the removal is complete - I think there's one empty building that I'm not sure about the plans for. Counterclockwise from the northwest the credit union is long gone (now "Andigo" and on Meacham) though I think the building is still there, there are some nice looking (and pricey!) apartments along the west side, then there's Top Golf at the southwest corner (which has been in operation for quite some time - pretty sure they were open before the pandemic). South center of the property along the expressway is the area still owned and occupied by a Motorola company. There's Zurich America at the southeast corner, which was the first new construction on the campus several years ago, and another new building ("B") just north and a little west of it that appears finished but I'm not sure it's actually occupied yet - I rarely drive by there during business hours. The east and northeast parts aren't really developed yet, but they're doing a lot of work on the roads around there (Algonquin and Meacham). There's an area of (I think) condos still under construction on the north side along Algonquin, the westernmost buildings are already occupied and they're working east at a pretty decent clip. In the center of the complex is the "B" building mentioned above, as well as the remaining unoccupied old Motorola property. There's also other construction in the area - one new apartment complex on Algonquin a bit west that's been there for a couple years, IIRC built on vacant land. The single-story office complex directly northwest of the campus was partially removed and is under construction for a new set of luxury apartments or condos, the western half of that complex is also for sale and I wouldn't be surprised to see it torn down and built on soon as well. My biggest disappointment about the whole thing is that once upon a time there was possibly going to be something called the STAR line, basically a commuter rail line built in the center of 90 running from O'Hare out to Elgin then south. I had dreams of them turning part of the Moto campus into a station and parking for that - would have been great for Schaumburg a decade or two back by providing easy access to the core of Schaumburg's shopping areas when malls were still highly relevant.

didip 5y ago

Many years down the road, will currently famous Silicon Valley headquarters suffer the same fate?

sergiotapia 5y ago

This is exactly why I love the Dark Souls series. They show a world long past it's time. Just enough detail to give you a glimpse of what life was like back in it's prime but not enough to ruin the melancholy. Beautiful!

sintezcs 5y ago

https://www.instagram.com/lanasator/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/lanasator/?hl=en I recommend Lana’s Instagram. A really fascinating and scary at the same time pics of soviet abandoned building and industrial places.

spc476 5y ago

I recall when IBM left Boca Raton, Florida (where the PC was invented) in the mid-90s. About a year after they left, a few friends and I roamed the abandoned IBM facility [1] and it was odd seeing empty computer rooms sans the raised floors. Some of the resulting pits were six feet deep (2m). Crazy. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/CKrEbTkRDwWQNc2d8 https://goo.gl/maps/CKrEbTkRDwWQNc2d8 Yes, it's a huge hexagon shaped building.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
This is over by Florida Atlantic University, originally built to be a lot harder to get into than most well-known institutions at the time. Didn't offer much undergraduate, just upper level only for top transfer students. Things have changed, the campus plus the airport were a former airbase carved out of the wilderness and used during the Cuban Missle Crisis. Boca was a small resort town on the coast and you had to go way west of town into the boonies before you came upon FAU out in the woods. Go much further west and it was basically everglades after that. One summer as a teenager a buddy and myself were riding horses about that far west of Boca Lake. Nothing but pines & palmettos for miles, it would not be fun to try and hike it because you need to be up on the horse to see over the palmettos. But this was not like any other summer. We came upon an unfamiliar clearing. As we got closer it loomed larger, it was zero vegetation, nothing but dirt with the rest of the woods still there as a wall on the other side of the field. We rode on out into the cleared land, this was no farm, you could see for miles to the north and south, yes we were in the middle of I-95 on horses, but no worries we were the earliest passenger traffic and there was no pavement or any way to get there by car yet. Well when they built the IBM location it was widely known to be for secret projects, so it was recognized to be appropriate for it to be like the Pentagon, except of course a hexagon instead. My grandma wanted me to work there, some of her clients knew some of the secrets, she was a fortune-teller. I went to the university instead.
- spc476 5y ago
  I too went to FAU, but by the time I attended (late 80s/early 90s) they had an undergraduate program in Computer Science. It's odd to think of FAU as being "way west" as it's less than two miles from the ocean and about 2.5 miles from downtown Boca Raton. It's built up since it sounds like you were there last---you now have to drive about 12 miles from shore to get to the Everglades.

khazhoux 5y ago

Startup idea: Airbnb for zombies. Buy up abandoned spaces like this, lease them to the undead horde. Payment might be a problem, as brains are not readily convertible to legal tender (perhaps BTC can help here?). Zombnb.

omoikane 5y ago

Link to the original album for people who just want the pics: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/72157712153499371 https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/7215771215...

petecooper 5y ago

See also https://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/ https://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/ for more of this type of thing.

H8crilA 5y ago

Bill Gates said that tech companies deserve higher risk premia due to the risk of technological obsolescence (which in short means lower equity price for the same projected future earnings). This story is a good example, IBM is another. Funny to contemplate that given the current prices of tech equity, both private and public.

wirthjason 5y ago

This is awesome. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs close to here. I always wondered what it was like on the inside. It’s eerie to see it in ruins. I imagine what energy it would have in its heyday.

peterburkimsher 5y ago

If you're interested in abandoned buildings and other artistic captures of the darker side of society, check out Artemy Lebedev - a Russian traveller who's been to pretty much everywhere in the world. https://www.tema.ru/eng/travel/ https://www.tema.ru/eng/travel/

luke2m 5y ago

I used to live down the road from moto headquarters and always wondered what it was like inside. This was very enlightening.

nimbius 5y ago

>it’s like the musings of an explorer who discovered a jungle city abandoned by a mysterious civilization Disclosure: I have worked in construction. I dont mean to get too off topic but please dont do this. Wandering abandoned buildings is very dangerous. Roofs and stairs can collapse seemingly for no reason, exposed floor tile can release asbestos, and dry bathrooms without water in the pipes can expose you to potentially lethal concentrations of sewer gasses like methane and hydrogen sulfide that build up in enclosed restrooms with no power to ventilation systems. If a fire starts, most emergency exits will be barracaded.

porknubbins 5y ago
The possible danger is part of the appeal though isn't it? We let people go cave diving and mountain climbing. I mean I'm not advocating for just anyone to go in structurally unsound buildings, trespassing is illegal for a good reason, but part of me appreciates the human curiosity of wanting to see what is inside areas that have been abandoned. Whether its the Paris catacombs, the NY subway tunnels, or a factory in Detroit there is often a good story in the remains.

nsynet 5y ago

Motorola is now a brand of Lenovo ,which is a Chinese company, and Motorola smart phone is also developed in Beijing of China, and producted in Wuhan ,maybe any other city of China. Motorola is still alive, in another formal.

LQexplanation 5y ago
The radio and emergency services part of company never went anywhere and it's now Motorola Solutions.

tablespoon 5y ago

> UrbanStreet Group and Antunovich Associates set up a joint venture called Veridian which would transform this abandoned site into a thriving urban center. It is anticipated that the first stage of this project will be completed in the fall of 2020. Veridian Dynamics?

porknubbins 5y ago

We are one and a half years into mass work from home and the idea that everyone in a company would need to jump in their cars and rush to appear on an office floor at 9:00am or something already (finally) seems completely ridiculous. Its like some Jetsons type bad sci-fi fantasy of how the future will work- as if the environment just becomes aesthetically more futuristic while the underlying social patterns are still set in the 1950s.

gfiorav 5y ago

The thing I love most of these is how ridiculous the “company culture” looks on those abandoned walls. Like the awards and recognitions in the cabinets that no one bothered to take with them. How utterly useless those are to company culture is made evident by how pathetic they look now, just left behind and meaningless.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

What a wonderful website. Just spent the last 3 hours reading the different stories. Like a walk through history.

indiantinker 5y ago

"The future of workplace"

malwrar 5y ago

This building has a special place in my heart. My dad used to work here when I was growing up and would take me there occasionally. I remember going between cubicles and asking people what they were doing, learning to make simple circuits in one of the labs there (simple stuff though, like hooking a battery up to a motor), and generally being fascinated by how fun of a job that looked to be and meeting the sorts of people who did it. I guess it was a good formative experience considering what I ended up choosing as my childhood hobby and later my job! Super weird to see this place again, sad to see what happened to it.

scottmcdot 5y ago

This building is similar to that in the second series of Homecoming.

garfieldnate 5y ago

Looks like a great parkour spot!

RobKohr 5y ago

I feel that in 5 years, abandonedspaces is going to have a lot of locations to cover.