It's Finally Here

After many years of planning and hand wringing, The Obama Presidential Center opened this month in Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago. 

Pointedly, it opened to the public on the nineteenth of June, the day we celebrate the federal holiday of Juneteenth, commemorating the day in 1865 when the slaves of Texas were emancipated and with that came the official and final end of slavery in the United States. 

That day can rightfully be called the true American Independence Day as it was the ultimate fulfillment of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4th, 1776. This idea was confirmed by President Kennedy when on June 26th, 1963 while standing in front of Rathaus Schoenberg in Berlin he said this:

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.

As I stated in earlier posts, the Obama Center belongs on the South Side of Chicago, the place where the first Black president of the United States spent many of his formative years and the childhood home of his wife Michelle Obama.

I also in those posts expressed my displeasure that the people who built the Center saw fit to place it on the edge of one of the city's most significant and beautiful parks, necessitating the destruction of over 600 trees, many of whom were over a century old, as well as several acres of parkland. 

For starters you can read about the specific site here and here. In total I have written about seven posts on the subject, several of which have links on these two posts. 

Since I've advocated for the Center but railed against its location on so many occasions, I'm not going to beat a dead horse here. Nor am I going to offer an opinion on the design of the campus because I haven't truly experienced it.

Yesterday on my way to a gig at the University of Chicago, I stopped by for the first time since its opening to snap some photos with my phone, two of which are these:

I'll have more to say about the Center after I have time to visit it in earnest.

All I'll say now, is that I'm thrilled the Center is finally built, and even more thrilled that it is on the South Side where it belongs. I just wish so much valuable park land didn't have to be sacrificed to build it. 

That's all.

All Gone

Now something from the day late and dollar short file:

Back in 2017, I wrote about the plans to build the Barack Obama Presidential Library smack dab in one of Chicago's most important treasures, Jackson Park. On a lovely summer day, I took my daughter to the proposed site and my heart broke as we encountered a lovely urban landscape filled with rolling berms and an extensive variety of mature trees, some well over a century old, all marked with little orange dots, signifying they were slated for destruction. 

I didn't realize it at the time, as there were no little orange dots present, but just to the north of the landscape, one of the loveliest formal settings in the park, the Perennial Garden, which featured a circular sunken lawn surrounded by flowering crab apple trees and the eponymous perennial plants, was also to be destroyed. 

The landscape, creation of the estimable landscape architects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, who restored the site back to a park after the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Garden, the work of May E. McAdams in the 1930s, were not destroyed right away, as a lawsuit challenging the wanton destruction of public park land delayed the inevitable for a couple of years. 

In 2019 a judge threw out the suit and the Obamas, shovels in hand, ceremoniously broke ground in 2021, officially sealing the fate of this portion of Chicago history. 

According to this Op-Ed piece in the Chicago Sun Times, published in 2020, citing an inventory of the site, said the 640 trees on that site alone:

store 203.8 tons of carbon, remove 5.8 tons of carbon from the air per year, remove 341.5 pounds of air pollution per year,...and have an avoided rainwater runoff amount of 9,591 cubic feet per year...

In addition, according to the piece: 

The planned tree destruction and Obama Presidential Center construction will evict small wildlife, including resident birds. Its 23-story tower will occupy a currently building-free migratory bird flight path, which inevitably will become a new source of migratory bird deaths.

A magnificent White Oak that almost certainly was present during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, dominates the landscape that stood in the way of the site of the future Barack Obama Presidential Library.
Everything in this photo has been destroyed. 

In my 2017 piece I quoted Barack Obama defending the construction of his monument in Jackson Park:

It's not just a building. It's not just a park. Hopefully it's a hub where all of us can see a brighter future for the South Side,

I have no qualms with the Obamas' claims for the value of the presidential library and all the potential good it will do for the city and especially for the South Side which has been neglected far too long. But I take strong issue with the former president's careless "not just a building, not just a park" remark. 

For God's sake Mr. President, you as a former Chicagoan of all people should know that landmarked buildings and parks are an important part of this city's cultural legacy. They were designed and built by some of the most significant artists this country has had to offer, and we have every right to be proud defenders of them. The loss of any of these should never be taken lightly as they are irreplaceable elements of our public, civic, and cultural landscape. 

Sometimes there may be no alternatives and serious choices must be made, even for ones on the National Register of Historic Places as Jackson Park is. 

But it is ridiculous to assume that there were no reasonable alternatives to the wholesale destruction of twenty contiguous acres of a landmark public park. Perhaps the designers could have worked with the existing landscape architecture of the park, or better yet, build somewhere else. It's a pretty hard sell to say there is simply no available land in that part of town. 

In both cases, perhaps scaling down the massive size of the project may have been necessary. I'm not sure but I don't think that idea would fly with the principal characters in this story, especially in a day and age where public monuments are becoming more and more imposing with each one trying to "one up" the previous one. Maybe we should be happy the Obamas didn't insist on having their monument occupy all of Jackson Park. 

Anyway, it's all water under the bridge now, the deed is done. A massive construction site today has replaced the landscape and perhaps the most beautiful formal garden that once graced the city.

It's all gone now and perhaps even worse than its loss is the dangerous precedent it sets. 

Our city's parks, a precious public trust, are no longer safe, even from people from whom we should expect much more.

What a shame.