Rewind to July 2016, when word leaked that Barack and Michelle Obama had chosen Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side as the venue for the Obama Presidential Center. Much of Chicago buzzed with excitement and satisfaction. The site, nestled in a corner of the park near the Museum of Science and Industry, stoked visions of “Museum Campus South.”
Still president at the time, Obama promised more than an homage to his legacy in choosing Chicago over other possible sites, including New York City. He talked of creating an engine for youth engagement and South Side revitalization.
What’s happened since then? A lot. Controversy over a private entity, the center, occupying public park space. Concerns of gentrification. Demands from the surrounding community for inclusion. A pandemic-related slowdown in fundraising toward the $500 million project. Nationally, Donald Trump’s improbable ascent to the White House and a global health crisis that continues to grip the city, nation and world. Then in November, the election of Obama’s VP, Joe Biden, as president.
That patch of land in Jackson Park earmarked for the Obama Presidential Center campus? Not a spade of dirt has turned.
THE CENTER’S ROADBLOCKS
The Obamas and their presidential center team must feel like they’re Sisyphus, only with a boulder the size of Saturn to heave uphill. After four years and five months, they’re still squinting at the horizon for a glimpse of the finish line. It’s time for this project to break the tape.
Roadblocks along the way have come in bunches, though some of them helped fine-tune the effort. The obelisk-shaped museum serving as the campus’s focal point has been redesigned a few times. At the community’s behest, the Obama Foundation scratched plans for an above-ground parking garage on Midway Plaisance and decided to build the garage underground and within the presidential center campus footprint.
A federal lawsuit filed in the summer of 2018 by an environmental group, Protect Our Parks, further slowed movement on the project. The suit claimed that the bid for the presidential center should be scrapped because it was being built by a private entity, the Obama Foundation, on public parkland, which would violate Chicago Park District code and state law. U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey did not agree and dismissed the lawsuit in the summer of 2019, declaring, “There should be no delay in construction.” In August, the 7th Circuit for the U.S. Court of Appeals effectively affirmed Blakey’s ruling.
THE GENTRIFICATION FACTOR
Residents of Woodlawn near the site wanted assurances that any gentrification resulting from the center wouldn’t price them out of their homes and rental units. After months of negotiations between Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration and South Side housing advocates, the City Council passed an affordable housing ordinance in September that will help Woodlawn tenants collaborate to purchase multiunit buildings in the neighborhood and set aside money for residents to fix up their homes.
One of the center’s last hurdles recently got cleared. Before the Obama center is built, the federal government had to sign off on it. That’s because Jackson Park, designed by famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is on the National Register of Historic Places, and because the plan involves major roadway changes.
That federal review began in December 2017. It was supposed to wrap up in 2018, but it wasn’t until Dec. 17 that the most critical step in that federal review concluded. We know federal bureaucracy tends to move with the zip of a tortoise, but three years?
A FINISH LINE IN SIGHT
A groundbreaking is now tentatively set for sometime in 2021. Chicago awaits what is sure to be a major tourism draw, and the South Side awaits the benefits that the Obama Foundation has promised the center would generate — more than $3 billion in economic development for surrounding communities in the first 10 years.
The fundraising effort is still only about halfway to the $500 million mark and the center, and its campus are expected to take roughly four years to build out. During a Nov. 15 interview on “60 Minutes” to promote his new book, Obama discussed the center and its mission, which includes engaging the surrounding community with activities, new gardens and walking trails and of course, exhibits that will include Michelle Obama’s famous dresses.
But the benefits of the center won’t come to fruition while the Obama Presidential Center remains merely a scale model on a conference room table. It’s time to get this project built.
— Chicago Tribune
