DELICIOUS: Obama’s Chicago Presidential Center Fought By Progressives And Environmentalists

In an ironic turn of events, the Presidential Center devoted to Barack Obama, who fancied himself as a man who cared about revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods and a man who cared deeply about the environment, has been hit with a lawsuit from progressives and environmentalists who don’t want what looks like a giant 235-foot monstrosity wrecking Chicago’s famous Jackson Park, the site of the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair.

As Dennis Byrne writes in The Weekly Standard, the $375 million Obama Presidential Center is running into opposition from “white Chicago lakefront progressives, University of Chicago professors, environmentalists, African-American activists, and a community organization of the kind that once employed Obama as an organizer.”

A group called Protect Our Parks filed a lawsuit on May 14 to obtain a court order preventing local government agencies from building the Obama center. The lawsuit seeks to bar the city from ceding control of the center’s site to the Obama Foundation. In order for the center to be built, the Chicago Park District and the City of Chicago would have to transfer public parkland to the Obama Foundation, which the lawsuit claims would constitute the “illegal taking of public park land.” The suit adds that the sale would be “a short con shell game, a corrupt scheme to deceive and seemingly legitimize an illegal land grab.” The suit alleges:

The City and Park District clearly realize and fully understand that this established law precludes the Park District from arbitrarily transferring possession, use and control of this dedicated “open, clear and free” public parkland in Jackson Park to a private nongovernmental … entity’s self-determined use. Defendants have chosen to deal with it in a classic Chicago political way, known as a short con shell game, a corrupt scheme to deceive and seemingly legitimize an illegal land grab, one that will endure for centuries to come, regardless of future changing public park needs and increasingly consequential environmental conditions.

As Byrne notes, “the plans for the Obama Presidential Center also appear to violate the city’s Lakefront Protection Ordinance, which has often been invoked to protect the 19-mile-long string of Chicago lakefront parks from exactly the kind of intrusion the Obama Foundation is proposing.”

This is not the first time preservationists have fought construction in the area; in 2016, Friends of the Parks filed a federal lawsuit that wound up blocking a proposal to put the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art along the lakefront south of Soldier Field.

On January 8, over 120 University of Chicago professors, faculty, and staff published a letter that listed over 20 community, labor, environmental, open space, and other groups whose objections to the project “taken together . . . form an intelligible whole.” The objections included the $175 million cost of related infrastructure, the surrender of public land to a private entity, and the proposed use of 21 acres guarded by the National Register of Historic Places. Additionally, a major thoroughfare would have to be constructed linking downtown with the South Side.

The letter stated that the location for the center “privileges cars and those who can afford them. Parking is expensive and though public land is being given away all the profits from the parking lot will go to the Obama Foundation. None of the funds go back to the city to improve train lines and public transportation infrastructure.”