Free Republic

The ongoing, and years-long, fight over the forthcoming Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago is heating up. Activists recently released a new set of demands for the project aimed at combating gentrification. They aren’t protesting the center itself, but are working to stop development from displacing them. “We’re not against the center,” Dixon Romeo, an organizer with the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, told Insider. He added that South Shore residents were among those who sent Obama to Springfield as an Illinois senator and later the White House. “The issue is if you’re not investing in community members and the...

CHICAGO - Less than 3 miles from where former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama broke ground last week on their long-awaited presidential center on the South Side of Chicago, Tahiti Hamer lies awake at night thinking about the limited time she and her family have left in the neighborhood where she's lived her whole life. Following the announcement of the center in 2015, neighborhoods adjacent to the 19-acre planned site have seen skyrocketing rents and housing prices, and Hamer, 42, a single mother of three, is one of several facing displacement. Hamer, a teacher at a local...

The foundation behind the planned Obama Presidential Center in Chicago has a tentative agreement with the city to pay just $10 to use 19.3 acres of city park space for 99 years, according to a report. The accord is described in legislation that Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration will send to the City Council on Thursday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. If approved, the proposals will bring the estimated $350 million project closer to reality. Per the agreement, the city will own the buildings and grounds, while the Obama Foundation will be responsible for the center’s upkeep and management, Crain’s Chicago Business...

Barack Obama made a habit of stealing private land to create more public parks. Now, in a highly ironic turn of events, public park activists have filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Chicago and the Chicago Park District to block construction of the planned Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park on the city’s South Side. The Obama Presidential Center has been mired in controversy from the start. In March 2015, the Chicago City Council approved an ordinance for Chicago Park District land in Jackson Park to be transferred to the City of Chicago to lease to the Obama...

The Obama Foundation is trying to generate as much public support as possible ahead of the city of Chicago's first municipal vote to approve construction permits that would allow the Obama Presidential Center to be built on historic parkland. The foundation's chief engagement officer, Michael Strautmanis, emailed "friends" of the project late last week asking them to show up at City Hall at 5 a.m. Thursday to demonstrate to city officials that local residents are behind it. Attendees were told to pick up Obama swag — T-shirts and buttons — from the organization's local headquarters ahead of Thursday. Although the...

In their effort to break the mold, the planners of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago are taking heat for some less-than-lofty features in the sprawling complex. Namely, a “test kitchen.” Reports first surfaced last fall that the monument to the first black president’s legacy was taking on an activity-center vibe. There would be a museum – but also a basketball court, possibly a room for yoga classes, and a test kitchen to teach visitors “about the full production cycle of nutritious food.”

Barack Obama’s Obama Presidential Center, a three-building complex designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien on Chicago’s South Side, has made its intention to embrace its neighborhood very clear—specifically Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance, the historic Frederick Law Olmsted–designed greenways that have hosted, among other things, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a.k.a. the “White City.” But what the Center hasn’t made as clear is that the complex’s footprint is growing, with its leaders recently proposing an aboveground parking garage that could take up about five acres of the Midway. The library’s concession for eating into this space is a...

The violence-plagued City of Chicago is “close” to the Obamas’ hearts, and it “will get a lot of their attention beginning in 2017,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Thursday. In fact, both Earnest and the president himself indicated on Thursday that Obama’s eventual presidential center will have benefits for the city where the murder rate has soared during the Obama presidency. […] Earnest said Obama will devote time to his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, a mentoring program for young minorities. “I know the president and first lady are also optimistic about the potential of the Obama presidential...

Tomorrow, the George W. Bush Presidential Center will be dedicated at Southern Methodist University in Texas. It's a good time to look back on the performance of the 43rd president, who has been almost entirely missing from the public stage these past four years. It's widely assumed that Bush is generally despised by the public. The perceptive American Interest blogger Walter Russell Mead stirred the ire of some former Bush aides when he recommended that Republicans avoid any defense of his record and move on to new issues. But perhaps Bush's name is not mud any more. The Washington Post/ABC...