"Oprah Winfrey" Closes Chicago Based Harpo Studios! 200 Employees Will Be Laid Off!!

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It's a wrap for Harpo Studios in Chicago. The facility, 

which Oprah Winfrey opened in 1990 to house her talk 

show empire, helped turn Chicago into a bustling 

television center and the West Loop into a resurgent 

urban neighborhood. But on Tuesday, she came to 

Chicago to tell employees that Harpo was closing for 

good.

Production is migrating to the West Coast, four years 

behind Winfrey, who left town to start her own cable 

network, OWN, in 2011. The work, which had 

dwindled to mostly postproduction editing on a handful 

of shows, is expected to wind down in phases, leaving 

about 200 staffers out of a job and Chicago's place in 

the television industry diminished.

The lease on the space, where Winfrey's eponymous 

show was recorded for decades, runs until April 2016. 

The last day of production will be Dec. 11, sources 

said. Harpo Studios had been at the center of 

Winfrey's broadcast universe since it opened, hosting 

her syndicated daily talk show through its finale in 

2011. Chicago-based real estate developer Sterling 

Bay Cos. bought the four-building Near West Side 

facility in 2014, paying a combined $30.5 million for 

about 170,000 square feet of space.

Executives with the Oprah Winfrey Network and Harpo 

Studios said the Chicago studios will be moved to 

network facilities in West Hollywood, Calif., by 

December. About 200 people are employed by Harpo 

Studios in Chicago, doing production work for OWN 

cable shows such as "Super Soul Sunday," "Oprah's 

Master Class," "Oprah: Where Are They Now," "Oprah 

Prime" and "Iyanla: Fix My Life." That work will 

continue in Chicago for now, but most of those jobs 

will be phased out as production on the shows 

transitions to OWN, a Harpo spokeswoman said 

Tuesday. Active filming on the Chicago studio lot, 

minimal in recent years, ended as of Tuesday, a Harpo 

spokeswoman said.