Oprah Winfrey To Close Legendary Chicago-Based Harpo Studios in December And "200-Person Staff" Would Be Layed Off

 

Oprah Winfrey is getting ready to leave Windy City for good in favor of Tinsel Town. 

By the end of this year, Winfrey's Harpo Studios will close its doors in Chicago after 26 years, and all of the operations will be moved to the Oprah Winfrey Network's new headquarters in West Hollywood, it was announced today.

The 61-year-old media mogul, ranked 603 on Forbes' 2015 list of billionaires, personally delivered the news to her staff in Chicago Tuesday morning.

The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) was founded by the former 'queen of daytime' in 2011 in Los Angeles, and Winfrey's executives have spent the past four years traveling back and forth between Chicago and Hollywood.

Two months ago, OWN moved into a new three-story space called The Lot in West Hollywood, setting the stage for the shutdown of Harpo Studios in Chicago.

'[Chicago has] been everything for me. I've spent more hours in this building than I have any other building on Earth,' Miss Winfrey told The Hollywood Reporter by phone. 'We were here when there was nothing but hoes and rats on the street, and now it's one of the hottest neighborhoods.'

The Academy Award-nominated actress and film producer acknowledged that it would be sad for her to bid farewell to her old home base, but she felt it was the right time to consolidate her network’s operations under one roof.

Harpo will stop shooting shows for OWN as of Tuesday, and the studio will officially shutter its doors in December.

Miss Winfrey said in a statement Tuesday that Harpo Studios has been a 'blessing' in her life and she's now 'looking ahead' to inhabiting her California studio. 

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Winfrey in Chicago - 1984 the morning talk show AM Chicago, which turned to the No 1 after a month in the market and was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show

Since 2011, the Chicago-based studio, which employed about 200 people, had produced 800 hours of original programming.

Only a small portion of the Harpo staff will join OWN's 140 employees in LA.

The move comes nearly a year after Winfrey sold the four-building Harpo Studios to the real estate development company Sterling Bay for estimated $32million. Under the agreement, the property was leased back to Harpo for two years.

The lease expires in April 2016, but the studio will close at the end of 2015.

Winfrey first came to Chicago in 1984 to be on the morning talk show AM Chicago. A month later, the show was No 1 in the market and was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In 1990, Winfrey moved into Harpo Studios in Chicago’s' West Loop, helping transform the surrounding neighborhood from a bleak industrial park into a trendy, family-friendly community.

Winfrey continued filming her popular daytime show at the 3.5-acre campus until 2011 when she left to start her own cable network.

That year, then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daly renamed the street outside Harpo Studios Oprah Winfrey Way.

 

 Culled from Daily Mail