What Does the Obama Center Owe Chicago?

Barack Obama was home on a mission. “South Side,” he whooped, proving himself to be an insider in the community where he wants to bring his presidential center.

In February, onstage at the same convention center beside the city’s gleaming downtown where he had delivered his farewell address last year, the former president was telling stories and cracking jokes. “Doin’ some math real quick,” he said, calculating the years he had spent in Chicago before landing in Washington, D.C.

But his tone had changed from a year ago, when, on the brink of handing over power to Donald Trump, he had exuded calm. “It’s good to be home,” he had said then, speaking glowingly of Chicago as a place of purpose and goodwill: “It was on these streets where I witnessed the power of faith, and the quiet dignity of working people in the face of struggle and loss.”

On this visit, Obama delivered a sharper message about his adopted hometown, his folksy language sometimes laced with defensiveness. He described the South Side as a place of “broken curbs and trash and boarded-up buildings.” He bemoaned that the parks up north outshone the ones south of the downtown. To concerns that rents were rising, he offered, “Well, here’s the thing, is that if you go into some neighborhoods in Chicago where there are no jobs, no businesses, and nothing’s going on, in some cases the rent’s pretty cheap. But our kids are also getting shot on that block.”

His center, he said, could “anchor a transformation of the South Side.” Envisioned as a laboratory of citizenship, the Barack Obama Presidential Center will transform urban parkland into a campus with a towering museum, a stone-paneled obelisk that will rise 235 feet above a public plaza. The approximately 20-acre