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Nearly seven years ago, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that Google had chosen Chicago as a new hub for its finance operations and planned to add hundreds of new jobs to a city workforce that already numbered 1,000.

A little over three years later, in 2022, Google said it would purchase the Thompson Center in the heart of Chicago’s Loop from the state of Illinois and establish a new office at that Helmut Jahn-designed building. The deal with Google marked an improbable rescue for an architecturally significant and generally exciting structure that a few years earlier had been at significant risk of demolition.

Beyond aesthetics and preservation, Google’s move also was a desperately needed jolt of good news for a moribund downtown sapped by

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