It’s striking that the groundbreaking for the Obama Presidential Center this week and the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire next week are butting together in history.
They both may be cases of something good coming from a wrenching experience. On a different scale than the fire and its devastating loss of life and property, perhaps the Obama Center can salvage its unsteady beginnings and build better from here.
There are other connections, too, that carry from the conflagration to the Obama Center construction.
After the fire came the rebuilding that led to Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape design for the 1893 World’s Fair; then Daniel Burnham’s Plan for Chicago; the Great Migration of Blacks to the stock yards and steel mills; the blockbusting, poverty and urban rot that followed; the need for community organizers, such as Barack Obama, to fight the structural racism, and the return to Chicagoof our 44th president, Obama, to plunge a shovel into Olmsted’s precious sod.
The steps connecting the fire history to Obama’s center show how progress can come in fits and starts.
The people who say the Obama center will defile a historic Olmsted landscape are right. The ones who complain the project steamrolled neighboring communities have a point too.
Yet so do those who laud the Obama Foundation’s plans to bring an estimated $3 billion in economic impact to the South Side in the center’s first 10 years — and work from that base to transform overlooked neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. As the former president said in his stirring address Tuesday, “everything most precious” to him began there.
Obama Center critics will still grieve the loss of stately trees and alteration of Olmsted’s design. They’ll carp, fairly, about betrayal of the ethos that bequeathed us a Chicago lakefront “forever free and clear.”
They’ll always have a case that building the center in Washington Park — amid neighborhoods where poverty occurs at triple the national rate — could have been transformative there.
Lawsuits and pushback may still continue. But the resistance is stuck in a lost war, stumbling through a forest while the world has moved on, begun to rebuild and cast the cause to forgotten history.
One by one, the politicians fell in line. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who as a candidate said the Obama Foundation should sign a community benefits agreement, shifted after the election and committed around $175 million in public infrastructure help to make the center a reality.
The groundbreaking Tuesday marked the point at which public focus pivots toward the future. If you think the groundbreaking was a happening, just imagine the opening gala a few years hence; the programs to attract Nobel winners and MacArthur “geniuses,” the Greta Thunbergs and Ibram X. Kendis.
Imagine community outreach that will turn that tall, angled building in Jackson Park into the loom for a fabric that weaves the city together.
The arc of a presidential center’s history can turn from controversy and contempt toward plaudits and purpose. The Carter Center in Atlanta is proof of that.
Set on a hill where Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman camped while his troops burned Atlanta, the Carter Center and a new four-lane road leading to it were cause for protest, lawsuits and anger. “First Sherman, now Carter,” read one placard along the route. “Stop the Carter Ego Expressway,” read another.
Carter carried on, as determined as Sherman marching to the sea. And, once built, the center worked for fair and free elections around the globe. It led the fight against Guinea worm, river blindness and malaria. And it became a platform from which the former president could flex his moral conscience on issues local, national and global.
Obama likely will use his center to similar effect. And he can change the narrative with a jolt by making a common-sense accommodation, literally in his center’s own backyard: negotiating and signing a community benefits agreement.
The former community organizer in Obama surely must see the hypocrisy of refusing to deal with community groups who want binding promises that they will share in the jobs and opportunity the center creates. Surely he must appreciate their honest effort to guard their neighborhoods against a gentrification that could force longtime residents from their homes.
Obama in his 20s must have heard the same “trust us, we know what’s good for you” that the center’s leadership is stating now. And the words are as empty today as they were then.
There was a risk, early on, that too much community say-so might slow the Obama center progress or even derail it. But those concerns are gone, and the question before the center now is about its future.
What does the Obama center want its origin story to be? That foundation President Valerie Jarrett stood her ground and told the neighbors to get lost? Or that Jarrett used her deep background in fair housing, her City Hall savvy, and the connections and wisdom from her White House days to finally do what’s right by the community?
For as long as the Obama Foundation refuses to seek a benefits agreement, it will mar the center’s reputation and raise questions about its motives. If Obama and his center really hope to stake out the moral high ground, the first step down that stony road needs to begin at home.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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