Former President Barack Obama’s presidential library in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side was controversial when it was initially planned.
Now, a new picture has emerged of the construction progress almost three years later – and it’s hard to put into words.
While the 44th president and Michelle Obama highlighted their personal ties to Chicago’s South Side during the 2021 groundbreaking of the ambitious Obama Presidential Center, the project had courted significant controversy since it was first announced years earlier.
Concerns about the short-sighted nature of the project were repeatedly raised by historians, archivists, environmentalists, community organizers, and local residents alike.
A key point of the controversy is that the Obama Presidential Center departs from precedent by being run by the private, nonprofit Obama Foundation rather than the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency overseeing all other recent presidential libraries and museums.
Critics like former Nixon library director Timothy Naftali warned this privatization opens the door for partisan curation of the archives meant to remain an impartial public resource.
Additionally, the Center will contain no physical research library on-site, with Obama’s unclassified records being digitized and put online by the Foundation. Scholars fear this lack of a dedicated presidential library could hamper in-depth archival study of the Obama White House.
However, the largest source of controversy came from the Presidential Center’s location – 19.3 acres of historic public parkland in Chicago’s Jackson Park, necessitating removal of over 1,000 mature trees and migratory bird habitat disruption, despite an alternative site being available nearby.
Local environmentalist groups like Protect Our Parks filed lawsuits trying to block construction in Jackson Park, seeking to preserve the urban greenspace and prevent a precedent of allowing private development of public parks.
Federal reviews eventually cleared the project under environmental regulations, but admitted the Obama Library would “diminish” the park’s historic integrity.
The site also sparked concerns about potentially displacing lower-income local residents amid rising rents and development spurred by the Presidential Center’s arrival.
Despite pleas from community coalitions like the Obama CBA Coalition to implement affordable housing protections, the former president refused to sign any community benefits agreement.
While Obama highlighted the area’s personal significance as where he launched his political career, met his wife, and started a family, critics like former resident Jeanette Taylor accused him of forgetting his roots and community organizer ethos. Taylor was later elected as an alderman and helped pass expanded affordable housing measures in 2020 to counteract the library’s negative economic impact to poor local residents.
As the Obama Presidential Center took shape following years of bureaucratic reviews and litigation, critics warned it would be an embarrassment.
Now take a look at it –
44 will not age well, I think. pic.twitter.com/5Issr7oiKZ
— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) April 1, 2024