Oprah Winfrey. Photo: Maryland GovPics / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
In 1984, Oprah Winfrey moved to Chicago to host AM Chicago, a half-hour morning talk show on WLS-TV that was running last in its time slot. Within months it had passed Phil Donahue’s show to become the highest-rated talk show in the city. Two years later it became The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast nationally from Chicago for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011.
Winfrey has since been ranked among the most influential women in the world, and in 2026 she was named the greatest living self-made American. Chicago was where that fortune was built.
A studio that remade a neighborhood
Winfrey’s Harpo Productions set up its studios in the West Loop when the area was mostly warehouses and meatpacking plants. Daily tapings brought audiences, staff, guests and media into the neighborhood, and restaurants and hotels followed. Harpo left Chicago after the show ended, and the West Loop has since become one of the city’s most expensive commercial areas. Business historians often point to Harpo as an early anchor in that change.
Lessons for small business
For neighborhood entrepreneurs, Winfrey’s Chicago story is a reminder of how one anchor tenant can change a district. Uptown has tried to apply the same idea through its entertainment venues. The Aragon, the Riviera, the Green Mill and the long effort to restore the Uptown Theatre are each meant to bring steady crowds that support restaurants and shops nearby.
Winfrey’s book club also showed how a single recommendation could move markets. Authors and publishers saw sales jump overnight. Independent bookstores, including those on the North Side, learned to stock up on her picks.
The media business
Winfrey went on to launch a magazine, a cable network and a string of production and streaming deals. She remains one of the few people to build a national media company from a local television job. Her rise also coincided with Chicago’s period as a hub for syndicated television, when several national talk shows taped in the city.
A Chicago figure
Although she has lived mainly in California for years, Winfrey is still widely seen as a Chicago figure. For a city that often measures itself against New York and Los Angeles, her success is part of local pride: proof that a national career could be built from a studio on the Near West Side.
Ruth Kaminski is the editor of The Uptown Ledger and covers neighborhood institutions and housing.
