Ex-AT&T campus in Chicago suburb lands biggest lease

Crystal Clean, an industrial waste management provider with more than 90 branches and waste recovery centers across the nation, signed the biggest lease for the former AT&T campus in Hoffman Estates.

The firm leased 39,000 square feet for 11 years at the abandoned 150-acre Bell Works Chicagoland in the northwest suburb, Crain’s reported. It plans to move its home office and the 180 employees who work there from nearby Eglin in August.

New Jersey’s Somerset Development bought the 1.6 million-square-foot campus in 2019, planning to turn it into a “metroburb” where people would work, shop, eat and live. The $200 million plan hit a roadblock when the pandemic forced companies to rethink their workspace needs.

Somerset has now leased 100,000 square feet of the 325,000 square feet of office space. Other tenants include Platinum Home Mortgage, Headline Solar and CPA Advisors Group, all of whom followed the first lessee, Fairgrounds Craft Coffee & Tea. The building also includes co-working space and a renovated fitness center.

Bell Works was designed so a quarter-mile corridor running through it could serve as an unofficial town center with retailers on either side. The project was modeled after a former Bell Labs research campus in Holmdel, New Jersey, that Somerset bought in 2013.

Crystal Clear employs about 1,400 people and generated $515 million in revenue last year.

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[CCB] — Victoria Pruitt