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CHICAGO — What kind of US president demolishes a cherished piece of American history in order to build a shrine to himself?
That’s what many Chicagoans are asking — and they aren’t talking about President Trump’s East Wing demolition to make way for a White House ballroom.
Locals are still trying to make sense of the $850 million Obama Presidential Center, dubbed “The Obamalisk,” which broke ground in Chicago’s historic Jackson Park in 2021 and will be finished next Spring.
“Obama, of all people, should not be building a palace for himself, a fortress in the middle of a public park. It’s just contrary to what I thought he believed in,” renowned Chicago architect Grahm Balkany, a self-described progressive liberal, told The Post.
“So many people in Chicago, unfortunately, didn’t want to speak truth to power — especially when that power was Obama.”
While many neighborhood residents who recently spoke to The Post gave the Presidential Center (not a library) a hesitant thumbs up, plenty of Chicago historians, preservationists and architects remain outraged.
“I always see it as a cenotaph, a tombstone, a crusader fortress in brutalist style,” W.J.T. Mitchell, an art historian at the University of Chicago, told The Post of the hulking, 240-foot-tall beige concrete and stone-clad tower.
“It’s not a beautiful building. Its monumentality violates the spirit of the democratic urban park” in which it stands, designed by visionary architect Fredrick Law Olmsted.
The Obama Foundation gobbled up 20 acres of the protected and landmarked Jackson Park, which sits on the national registry of historic places, for the project.
The park, huddled next Lake Michigan, was designed by Olmsted — the man who, alongside Calvert Vaux, designed New York’s Central Park — for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a nation-defining event credited with putting modern Chicago on the map.
The Obama Foundation’s actions are at odds with Olmsted’s work, democratizing the idea of the public park, according to Mitchell.
“[Olmsted] was transforming park design from the English manor house [which] was always punctuated by the castle, or some magnificent building, to signify the feudal lord who owned that land,” Mitchell told The Post.
The architect believed “this is public land, this is owned by everybody. There should not be any great monuments or monumental buildings. It’s about the people,” Mitchell continued.
“The most atrocious thing was when they started clearcutting a thousand, healthy, century-old trees. I was there to document it. It struck many people as an environmental disaster,” Mitchell added.
The project raised eyebrows from the start. While Chicago seems a natural home for Obama’s monument, the former president made the city bid against two other locations —New York and Hawaii — to host his center.
The city sweetened the deal with the prized lakefront Jackson Park public land. This occurred under the Chicago mayorship of Rahm Emmanuel, who also served as Obama’s chief of staff at the White House.
One of many lawsuits filed against the Obama Foundation over construction revealed it was able to acquire the public land from the city via a 99-year-long “land use agreement” as opposed to a lease. It cost the Obamas just $10, according to University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who was involved in a lawsuit against the Obama Foundation over the building, and spoke with The Post.
During the building, a relic of women’s history was paved over. The Center bulldozed Jackson Park’s Women’s Garden — a local favorite spot for picnics and cookouts — to create a staging area for earth movers. The Women’s Garden was created in the 1930s by landscape architect May McAdams to commemorate the pavilion which had stood on that site during the 1893 Fair.
That pavilion had been the first structure of its kind built by a female architect, 21-year-old Sophia Hayden, and was heralded as a major milestone in women’s professional recognition at the time.
“This was an administration that many people in Chicago supported and thought was really revolutionary. And then to see that same administration take these 20 acres from the public was very disturbing,” said Ward Miller, a Chicago architect and executive director of the nonprofit Preservation Chicago, an advocacy group for historic architecture.
“It seems in stark contrast to the pastoral and naturalistic landscape … The lack of windows and the materials and the shape, and most of all the height, has a startling impact,” he told The Post.
Obama even admitted in interviews he nagged his architects to make the building even taller from what they proposed and inundated them with his own rough sketches of what he wanted it to look like.
The next slap came when Obama hired a New York firm to design the building, a major rebuff to Chicagoans’ civic pride in its current local architects.
“Vanity drove the structure,” Epstein added to The Post.
Behind schedule and plagued by lawsuits, the original $300 million cost of the privately funded Center has ballooned to $850 million.
Despite common misconceptions, the Center cannot legally call itself a presidential library. For starters, it’s way too big. Soaring 240 feet in the air, the equivalent of 23 stories, the vast compound violates congressional rules on the sort of structures that constitute a presidential library in both height and square footage (the maximum height allowed is 70 feet).
Additionally, the Obama administration’s records, documents, and archives — generally considered the main point of a presidential library, of which there are now 15, extending back to Herbert Hoover — will not be kept there.
No one is sure where they will end up; they’re currently sitting in a warehouse in the Chicago suburbs. Visitors to the Obama Center will be able to access some digitized archives.
“Our mission at The Obama Foundation is to inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world,” the Center says on its website.
The Foundation did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
Former First Lady Michelle has a stake in it too — an entire exhibit dedicated to her dresses. On her podcast this month, she unironically talked about Trump’s demolition of an easterly White House facade to build a ballroom, saying it “denigrates” the building. “To tear it down, to pretend like it doesn’t matter — it’s a reflection of how you think of that role,” she said.
While the Obama Center is technically privately funded, it’s more of a public-private partnership — and not just because of the land it sits on.
Chicago taxpayers were on the hook for hundreds of millions to reroute roads around the center — disrupting the city’s famed, park-laden boulevard system and, according to Balkany, further isolating poor black residents south of Jackson Park from wealthy Hyde Park to the north — where the Obamas have a house.
“From a functional interconnectivity perspective, they’ve basically barricaded Hyde Park from the rest of the South Side,” Balkany claimed of the Obama Center’s reconfigured roadways. After the plans for Center had been unveiled, the architect made his own proposal, designed with community input, to show how it could have worked better.
Local residents who spoke with The Post said they worried poorer residents of the local area may be moved out, if the Center proves a success.
Many also worry that if the Center’s endowment fails to stash away the $400 million it promised the city, taxpayers could be on the hook for maintenance, repairs, or even daily operations.
The endowment currently only has $1 million in the fund, and the center is projected to see operating costs of $30 million annually.
A former senior White House advisor during Obama’s administration, Valerie Jarrett, serves as CEO of the Center, where she earns a staggering $740,000 a year, according to tax documents.
“I often think of the contrast with Jimmy Carter, as an ex-president. He stayed in the same house in Plains, Georgia and engaged in direct action programs in Africa, all sorts of philanthropic enterprises,” Mitchell said.
“He didn’t focus on building monuments or building fancy houses in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard, so he could vacation all over the place.”
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