Nowhere is the demise more keenly felt than in New Jersey, where the country’s first corporate campus was built in Murray Hill by AT&T Bell Labs in 1942. The state experienced perhaps the biggest building boom of office parks during the 1980s.

“The model as it played out in New Jersey is now seemingly obsolete,” said Louise A. Mozingo, the chairwoman of the department of landscape architecture and environmental planning at University of California, Berkeley.

Suburban office parks have lost their luster for a variety of reasons, including a growing preference among younger workers for life in more dynamic urban centers than in sometimes staid and sleepy suburbs. And the rapid pace of technological advancement has made the need for many clerical and processing jobs and the real estate to house those workers increasingly obsolete.

But it was the recession and its aftermath that sounded the death knell for many suburban parks; New Jersey lost about 100,000 office-related jobs since 2008, according to James W. Hughes, a professor at Rutgers University. By 2010, the majority of the state’s suburban office inventory was between 20 and 30 years old, built during a much more primitive information technology era.