Corporate photography at The Old Post Office

The Old Post Office at 433 West Van Buren Street was built in 1921 and spans three city blocks of limestone in the West Loop, straddling the Eisenhower and Congress Parkway. At 2.8 million square feet it stood empty for two decades before a restoration reported at around a billion dollars brought it back, and it has been described as the largest historic redevelopment in the nation. What that means on a shoot day is a building with the proportions of 1921 and the systems of a modern one: deep floor plates, tall windows, and interiors that have been worked on recently enough that the finishes are worth photographing rather than working around.

The tenant list is public and it is broad. Cboe Global Markets is headquartered here, having moved in during 2020 on a fifteen year lease of roughly 185,000 square feet. Ferrara Candy came from Oakbrook Terrace into about 77,000 square feet with around 400 employees. Uber, PepsiCo, Walgreens, Cisco Systems, Home Chef and CoinFlip are here as well, which puts exchange trading, consumer brands, technology and retail in one building.

A 1921 floor plate is deep, so the light at the perimeter and the light in the middle are different problems and we bring a full studio setup for both. Ask your office manager which conference rooms kept the tall original windows, because those are the rooms to book. Dock hours, freight access and any certificate of insurance are worth settling with building management a week out. The rooftop is a known amenity here and any use of it has to be arranged through the building rather than assumed on the morning.

We photograph on site, in your own office. If your team is in this building, the notes below are what the day looks like. Nothing here is a claim to a past session in it, and no tenant named is a client unless it says so elsewhere on this site.