Shapack, Litowitz Bring Barstool to West Loop

UPDATED

Call it the wild West Loop once Barstool Sports moves in.

Barstool, the sports media firm founded by the outspoken Dave Portnoy, signed a deal to occupy around 40,000 square feet at 400 North Noble Street, an industrial building that Jeff Shapack and Alec Litowitz bought to convert into creative office space, Crain’s reported.

The new location will include a full-size basketball court, a golf simulator, music studios and other space for media content creation. Barstool’s move will add some more sizzle just west of Fulton Market, where several large apartment and office projects are in the works.

Shapack Partners and Litowitz, founder of Magnetar Capital, founder Alec Litowitz purchased the 400 North Noble site for $6.5 million in 2019. Barstool’s occupancy will fill up the remainder of the site. NanoGraf, a manufacturer with a federal contract to make components of batteries used in electric vehicles, leased about 17,0000 square feet for its new corporate headquarters in the building, which also 11,000 square feet for labs and production space.

That facility is currently under construction and is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter or early second quarter 2023, NanoGraf said in December.

Penn Entertainment bought a 36 percent stake in Barstool for $163 million in 2020, and it acquired the rest of the company in February for about $388 million. The current CEO is Erika Ayers, who said the company will remain based in New York as its main headquarters location.

Dan “Big Cat” Katz, Chicago-native and co-host of the popular Barstool show Pardon My Take, spoke about the new Fulton Market site during a March 1 episode.

“The amount of content that we’re going to be able to create day to day is going to be insane just by the space that we have,” Katz said.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Jeff Skender, Scott Shelbourne and Ari Klein represented Barstool in leasing discussions, while Shapack Partners’ Paige O’Neil and Annie Aldrich handle leasing for 400 North Noble. Raise Commercial Real Estate’s Jamie Katcher, Douglas Regal, and Sebastian Infante also represented Barstool in the transaction, co-brokering the deal with the Cushman team.

— Quinn Donoghue

This story was updated to add that the Raise Commercial Real Estate team co-brokered the lease alongside Cushman on behalf of Barstool.