CHICAGO — Barack Obama on Thursday will inaugurate his sprawling presidential center along the Lake Michigan shoreline in the city that launched his trajectory to the White House as the country’s first Black president.
More than 500 guests are expected to gather at the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park for the celebration, which will include performances by Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and Jennifer Hudson, among others.
Workers had spent the last few days furiously adding the finishing touches to the $850 million complex, which includes not just the imposing granite tower with exhibits on Obama’s career but community-friendly amenities like a splash park, barbecue grills and a new branch of the Chicago Public Library. The 19-acre grounds open officially to the public on Friday, the Juneteenth holiday.
The gathering is expected to include top Obama administration officials such as Valerie Jarrett, now the CEO of the president’s foundation, and Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor. President Donald Trump, Obama’s political rival who dismissed the new center as a “disaster,” was the only living president not invited to the event.
Obama referred obliquely to the disconnect in remarks Tuesday at a private reception for donors and staff at the center as he paid tribute to his late in-laws, Fraser and Marian Robinson. The working-class South Side residents who raised former first lady Michelle Obama and her older brother in a modest bungalow on South Euclid Avenue nearby represented “what’s best about this country and what’s best about our values,” Obama said Tuesday.
“We’ve got a set of institutions that have fallen victim to the siren song of, ‘Everything’s about money, and everything’s about attention, and everything’s about fame,’” he continued.
Obama recalled arriving in the city in 1985 in a “janky car” to become a community organizer in housing projects on the city’s South Side. He later met Michelle and settled in, launching his political career and raising their daughters in a brick Georgian home four miles away from the center.
“Most of what’s been important in my life is because of this place,” Obama said.
Obama began making plans for the presidential complex in the last days of his second term, Jarrett said this week. The foundation eventually settled on this corner of Jackson Park, a historic area along the lakefront originally designed in 1871 by revered landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux.
The project suffered years of legal challenges, cost overruns and concerns from neighbors about the loss of green space and fears that it would push out existing residents.
In her remarks at the private reception, Michelle Obama recalled growing up on in a South Side that was boarded off and “uncared for.”
“The message to me and to kids like me is that we weren’t worth investing in,” she said. “Now we have this.”
The center has a sledding hill, the kind Michelle Obama always wished for while she was growing up.
The center’s 225-foot granite tower, which some have dubbed the “Obamalisk” for its stark, brutalist appearance, has four floors of exhibits designed to show the arc of Obama’s historic victory in 2008. There is even a model of Obama’s Oval Office, where visitors can sit at the Resolute Desk.
Samantha Smith, 44, a hairstylist and lunchroom manager, said she had “manifested” some early preview tickets to the center a few weeks ago by putting a note out on Facebook. One of her friends reached out with a last-minute tour spot.
“It’s breathtaking,” Smith said. “For me, it will become a treasure for the South Side of Chicago — and Chicago in general.”
Her favorite exhibit is the video of Obama’s victory speech in 2008 in Grant Park, just up the road.
“It was electric,” she said. “I stood there and cried just like I did watching it the first time.”
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