1. GOODBYE FIELD’S: A name that has served as the hallmark for Chicago-area shoppers for 150 years found itself relegated to the history books, as new owner Federated Department Stores said it will scrap the Marshall Field & Co. banner. Many loyal customers made final holiday season trips to the flagship State Street store. Families snapped photos outside the store, took in the window displays and cleared the shelves of Field’s collectibles.
2. A NEW SEARS: Kmart finalized its takeover of Chicago icon Sears, Roebuck and Co., a deal engineered by billionaire hedge fund manager Edward Lampert. Sears Holdings, the new entity, remains headquartered in Hoffman Estates, but roughly 1,400 of the retailer’s employees were shown the door and Chief Executive Alan Lacy was demoted.
3. BLACK DAYS: Former press Baron Conrad Black (right) was indicted on racketeering and other charges, on top of an $84 million fraud case, as federal prosecutors claimed he ran his media empire, which included the Chicago Sun-Times, as a criminal enterprise. Black’s lawyer, Edward Greenspan of Toronto, denounced the racketeering charges as “a blatant example of overreaching.”
4. CORPORATE BOUNCE BACKS: Boeing Co. and Motorola Inc. pulled off stunning comebacks. Chicago-based Boeing won back bragging rights over Airbus SAS for most commercial aircraft sales for the year, while Schaumburg-based Motorola rediscovered its cool and revived its stock price on the back of the Razr mobile phone design.
5. CBOT GOES PUBLIC: The 157-year-old Chicago Board of Trade, which has a near-stranglehold on contracts for U.S. Treasuries, completed an initial stock offering and saw its shares surge nearly 150 percent in their first four days of trading. That was better than the performance of its bigger rival, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which experienced a gain of less than 30 percent in the first four days after it went public. Both stocks now have descended somewhat nearer to Earth.
6. NYSE PLUS ARCHIPELAGO: Seat owners of the New York Stock Exchange and shareholders of Chicago-based Archipelago Holdings Inc. approved a nearly $9.5 billion deal that will turn the Big Board into a for-profit enterprise with computerized trading capabilities. There are 1,366 seats on the exchange, and one recently fetched $4 million, a new high.
7. TALLER TOWERS: In a city of cloud-busting behemoth skyscrapers, the latest proposals to push toward the sky were enough to make jaws drop. A pair of buildings, each rising more than 2,000 feet, was proposed for an area near the Gold Coast, spawning nicknames such as “the Drill Bit” (right) and “the Tweezer Tower.”
8. ANDERSEN DECISION: The Supreme Court reversed a 2002 criminal conviction of one-time Chicago accounting giant Arthur Andersen, well after the firm collapsed in the wake of its involvement in the Enron scandal. There are no signs of a comeback.
9. SARA LEE CHIEF: Veteran food industry executive Brenda Barnes became chairman of Sara Lee Corp., the nation’s 104th-largest company. Barnes, who is moving the company’s headquarters from Chicago to Downers Grove, is leading Sara Lee through a risky restructuring that could cement her standing as a marketing whiz. She also becomes one of the nation’s most prominent female CEOs.
10. AON SETTLES: Chicago-based Aon Corp. agreed to pay $190 million to settle fraud charges brought by regulators in three states and selected a relative unknown, McKinsey & Co. consultant Gregory Case, to lead the world’s second-largest insurance broker. The move took place after Chief Executive Patrick Ryan said he would step aside.
