[tomkat0789]

Even stranger is the abandoned Motorola complex built way out among the farmlands in Harvard, Illinois.

Motorola has fallen far! When I started a job at a big company in a Chicago suburb, they actually asked for a show of hands "who's from Motorola" and like 17/20 people raised their hands!

[derekp7]

So that Harvard facility -- from what I heard (when I worked for Moto) was that it was built for the main purpose to give to one of the Galvin family members to manage. They built it as an engineering and manufacturing center, and was expecting a bunch of engineers that worked at Libertyville to move out there. Problem is that was during the dot-com boom and people would rather get a different job then relocate to the middle of a corn field (actually a lot of people bought out in Crystal Lake, causing a housing boom there, which later collapsed when the Harvard building was shut down).

Then they outsourced manufacturing (the phones were no longer bullet proof after the outsourcing / offshoring). So they made Harvard a distribution center. They were hoping to also be able to pull workers from Rockford, but that didn't really work out either.

At one point, after Moto sold the building, an investor was going to turn it into the worlds largest indoor water park. That never panned out either.

[wyldfire]

I assumed from the title that this would be the Harvard facility. I never would have dreamed that Schaumburg would be shut down as long as the brand existed. How wrong I was!