Atlanta Black-owned toy store to be featured in Obama Presidential Center
LOL…” huge crowds of tourists flocking to the Obama flak tower.” Sure.
I wonder what the Soros budget has allocated to hire “visitors” to this laughable monument to hate and incompetence.
Not really convinced it will be the tourist attraction they are claiming it will be, but eh, maybe there are that many rubes in the world.
0 and the mooch were always yappin about the environment. That would include being fake tree huggers.
Who are they kidding? The Obama flak tower, I predict, will have few visitors from out of town. Birds will like it, I suppose.
All that raised laundered money’s going to the Demorats. Another scam job on the people.
That hideous building looks like it was built by an architect with dyslexia.
(flocking to the South Side)
I just bought a new Metallic Pea Family Truckster
We’ll get sandwiches 🥪🥪🥪 at the gas station ⛽⛽⛽
There was ample room in a rather featureless park west of the Midway. But this is the site of the historic Columbia Exposition of 1892, when modern America made her debut to the world. Naturally Obama was obsessed with erasing the last vestiges of the Frederick Law Olmsted- designed lakeshore park and the connection to America’s history.
I think it’s a great looking building...for a multi-story outhouse.
Influx of visitors?
Well, if Bammy is counting on me, he better not keep the light on.
What’s the over under on it providing the call to prayer 5 times a day?
How many visitors will want to stay overnight near there. This Obama center is in a bad neighborhood.
Will the presence of the Obama center generate gentrification?
If only Mike Royko were still around to write about it!
What is the over/under on the number of shootings during the ribbon cutting?
Short-term rentals? Like Japanese love hotels?
Short-term rentals
Pay toilets 50 cents a night
Ah, Chicago, my sweet home, where the wind howls like a politician dodging a straight question, and the lakefront gleams with dreams that sometimes turn into taxpayer nightmares.
It’s me, Mike Royko, or at least the ghost of me, rattling my typewriter from the great beyond. Been dead since ‘97, but if I were still pounding the pavement in 2026, I’d have plenty to say about this Obama Presidential Center rising up in Jackson Park like a concrete monolith from some sci-fi flick.
They call it a “center,” not a library, which is fitting because it’s less about dusty books and more about a shiny legacy that costs more than a ward boss’s slush fund.
Look, I covered enough mayors and presidents to know a boondoggle when I see one.
Barack Obama, the smooth-talking kid from the South Side who climbed to the White House on hope and change—good for him. But this thing? Started at 300 million bucks, now ballooning past 800 million, with delays that make the CTA look punctual.
And who’s footing the bill? Not just private donors, oh no. The city’s chipping in hundreds of millions for roads, bridges, and whatever else to pretty up the joint.
That’s our money, folks—the same dough that could fix potholes big enough to swallow a Buick or shore up schools where kids learn in trailers.
They plunked it in Jackson Park, that Olmsted gem where folks used to picnic without dodging construction cranes. Environmentalists howled about chopping trees and paving paradise, but the lawsuits got swatted away like flies at a Sox game.
Now it’s this towering “Obamalisk”—yeah, I heard that nickname—wrapped in quotes from his speeches, like it’s a fortune cookie on steroids.
Windows? Sparse, to protect the artifacts, they say. Artifacts from what, his Nobel Prize for showing up? It’s got a basketball court, gardens, even a recording studio. Swell for the tourists, but will it really lift the South Side, or just gentrify it into another yuppie playground where rents skyrocket and old-timers get pushed out?
Don’t get me wrong; Obama’s no Nixon. He didn’t bug his own office or bomb Cambodia. But presidential libraries—or “centers”—are ego trips disguised as history lessons.
Ike’s was modest; Reagan’s had Hollywood flair. This one’s got that Obama polish: inclusive, innovative, all about “community.” Yet critics call it fortress-like, a Death Star in stone. And with opening pushed to summer ‘26, amid whispers of more overruns, I wonder if it’ll be another Millennium Park fiasco—late, overbudget, but hey, the bean shines.
Chicagoans, we’ve seen it all: Daleys building empires, Blago selling seats. This center might inspire kids, sure, but let’s not kid ourselves—it’s a monument to power, paid for by the little guy.
If Obama wants to give back, how about funding real change: jobs, not jargon. Me? I’d rather sip a beer at Billy Goat Tavern and watch the pols squirm. But that’s just an old columnist’s gripe. Keep hoping, Chicago—it’s what we do best.
-AI Royko
Chicago has become such a disaster under Mayor Brandon that I really don’t think anyone has to worry about gentrification, even around Obama’s cement tower. Anyone with money is fleeing to just outside of the city limits.