Presidents line up for Obama’s long-awaited center in Chicago

It took more than a decade of planning, a messy court battle with preservationists and years of plodding construction, but the Obama Presidential Center will finally be unveiled on the South Side of Chicago today.

The opening will be a star-studded party, concert and celebration, the rare event that is expected to draw four former presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, along with Barack Obama. (An invitation was not extended to President Donald Trump, who recently compared the center with a trash heap.) Bruce Springsteen, Bono and Jennifer Hudson will perform. Senators raced to show up for votes in Washington on Wednesday so they could hop on planes to Chicago.

For Chicagoans, the opening of the $850 million, 19-acre museum campus has been a long time coming: It was two mayors ago, in 2015, when Obama announced that the museum would be built in his adopted hometown of Chicago. Since then, the museum and everything that has come with it — a playground, a public library, a sledding hill — has slowly come together in Jackson Park, near the University of Chicago campus.

The museum is not just a reminder of Obama’s presidency, said Rahm Emanuel, a chief of staff in Obama’s White House who was also mayor of Chicago in 2015 and helped with what he called the “hustle, calculation, maneuvering and jostling” to bring the museum to the city.

“For the city as a whole, it’s a billion-dollar infusion of an investment that pays dividends way beyond the billion dollars, specifically on the South Side,” Emanuel said. “This is generational.”

The Obama Foundation, which has paid for the new center with private donations, said that 250 people would work at the museum, and 1 million people were expected to visit the campus each year. Tickets are $30 for adults and $26 for Illinois residents.

On the eve of the opening, as Chicago was drenched by a heavy summer rain, workers scurried outside the center in Jackson Park, putting finishing touches on preparations, as streets nearby were blocked off in anticipation of the crush of visitors today. On the grassy expanse of the Midway Plaisance nearby, a giant screen was erected to broadcast the ceremony to Chicagoans who wished to gather and watch from the lawn.

Even in the pouring rain, visitors near the museum angled for a glimpse of it from behind the imposing barricades.

Tarek Atia, a writer from McLean, Virginia, had just arrived in Chicago on a train from upstate New York solely to have a look at the museum.

He had no particular agenda other than looking at the museum from the outside, he said, straining to read the text imprinted on the outside of the 225-foot granite-covered tower that is sometimes called the Obamalisk. More than anything, Atia said, he hoped the museum would live up to its promise.

“I hope it builds community,” he said.

Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois secretary of state and a longtime friend of Obama, said he had been inundated by friends and acquaintances who were asking for help securing tickets to the museum. (Tickets are already sold out through November.) Giannoulias brought his family for a sneak peek of the museum last month and found himself moved to tears, he said.

The museum will “bring visitors and investment to the South Side, celebrate a historic presidency with deep roots in our city and serve as a reminder that the city remains a place where big ideas and big projects can thrive,” he said, adding that the center brought a certain sense of pride to Chicagoans because of Obama’s connection to the city.

The Obamas have always emphasized that this museum was not intended to be a traditional presidential library, but also a community hub, a sprawling campus with a garden, a basketball court and performance spaces. Obama’s records will be stored by the National Archives.

The museum was built along Lake Michigan in Jackson Park, at the edges of Woodlawn and South Shore, neighborhoods that experience frequent gun violence — in April, a 16-year-old boy waiting for a bus outside Hyde Park Academy was shot to death, just two blocks from the presidential center. Residents said they had mixed feelings about the museum: hope that it will bring more development to the neighborhood, but also fear that it will usher in so much gentrification that their rents will go up.

The Rev. Corey Brooks, a conservative pastor in neighboring Woodlawn, has been a frequent critic of the center, questioning whether it will have a positive impact on the residents who live in the community.

But he said he had received an invitation to the opening ceremony and intended to be there. “Anything they spent $800 million on in our neighborhood makes it imperative that I see it,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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