December 1, 2006
Oprah buys new home in Chicago
The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Oprah Winfrey is moving into a 5,000-square-foot Chicago apartment in the co-op building at 199 E. Lake Shore Drive. In a Page One story (Sun Times), Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed claims that the talk-show queen will give up her massive duplex in Chicago’s Water Tower Place, which she has owned since 1993, and will move into the sixth-floor apartment at 199 E. Lake Shore, which had been listed for $6.2 million and which recently closed. While we can’t dispute that the closing may well have occurred already, as Sneed has reported (although co-op sales are not public record in Illinois), Sneed’s column was painfully short on details. Winfrey’s current home has not been listed, and the columnist bothered neither to seek Winfrey’s comment nor to explain why Oprah would downsize from a larger apartment to a smaller one. And given the sheer amount of real estate that Winfrey owns, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Winfrey is buying the unit at 199 E. Lake Shore for someone else. Still and all, Oprah always attracts big headlines in Chicago and beyond, and the building where Sneed reports that she’s buying is a classic co-op building, with just 13 apartments in 12 stories. The late actor John Candy once lived in the building, and actress Meg Ryan once stayed there while filming a movie in Chicago, Sneed reported.
Filed under Hollywood Stars by Bob Goldsborough
Comments on Oprah buys new home in Chicago »
At long last, the scoop on Oprah’s co-op on East Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; talk-show queen reportedly never moved in, apparently because of prying eyes! She’ll stay in Water Tower Place, when she’s in the Windy City @ 9:57 am
[...] As we noted back in late 2006, the talk-show queen at that time bought and planned to move into a 4,607-square-foot, sixth-floor cooperative apartment in the building at 199 E. Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Oprah purchased the unit for an undisclosed price, but it had been on the market at that time for $6.2 million. Like many others, we were also puzzled as to why Winfrey would abandon her much larger, longtime, 15,000-square-foot duplex condominium apartment (actually, four units combined into one) in Chicago’s Water Tower Place (and no, readers, Oprah does *not* live in Chicago’s Lake Point Tower building and never has, despite the never-ending urban myth to the contrary). Our thought in late 2006 was that as Winfrey was spending more and more time at her spreads in Montecito, Calif. and in Hawaii, she felt she only needed a modest pied-a-terre for the few days a week that she actually was spending in Chicago. Plus, we also had assumed that Oprah wasn’t enamored of riding elevators with so darn many other people in Water Tower Place (which as anyone who has visited to Chicago knows is one large building); by comparison, the cooperative buildings on East Lake Shore Drive are much smaller, very exclusive and generally sleepy places to live, with many elderly residents. .gallery { margin: auto; } .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } .gallery img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } [...]