Tomorrow, on Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public on the South Side of Chicago. It took more than a decade from announcement to opening, construction began in 2021, and the tower topped out in mid-2024. At an estimated cost of $850 million, it is the most expensive presidential library ever built. It sits on 19.3 acres at 6001 South Stony Island Avenue, in the neighborhood where Barack and Michelle Obama's story began, and it opens with a museum, a public library branch, a basketball court, a fruit and vegetable garden, an Eleanor Roosevelt garden, a John Lewis Plaza, walking trails, a great lawn, and a water terrace honoring Obama's mother Ann Dunham.
Joshua Lott/For The Washington Post
The museum tickets for opening weekend are sold out. The campus grounds are free.
Last weekend, the current president of the United States held a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House, a fighter called the former first lady a man into a microphone, the president nodded off during the main event of his own birthday party, and the post-fight Truth Social dispatch was filed at two in the morning with the word “Dumocrats.”
The Obama Presidential Center will also be the first fully digitized presidential library, meaning its records will be accessible to researchers and citizens everywhere rather than locked in a physical facility requiring travel and clearance. The museum includes four floors of exhibits, a full-scale replica of the Oval Office, and a Sky Room with panoramic views of Chicago’s South and West Sides. There are thirty original artworks commissioned specifically for the campus, including works by Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, and Mark Bradford. The library branch carries books chosen by the Obamas. The basketball court is NBA regulation size. The sledding hill is for the neighborhood kids.
The opening falls on Juneteenth weekend, giving the moment an extra layer of celebration and meaning. The first Black president’s legacy center opening on the holiday commemorating the end of slavery in America, on the South Side of Chicago where he organized communities and fell in love and built a life before the world knew his name. The symbolism is not subtle. The symbolism does not need to be subtle. Some things earn their symbolism.
The contrast with the current occupant of the office Obama held is not a partisan observation. It is an aesthetic one, a moral one, and a historical one simultaneously. One man spent his post-presidency building a public library, planting an Eleanor Roosevelt vegetable garden, commissioning thirty artists, opening a basketball court to the neighborhood, and putting the whole thing on Juneteenth on the South Side for free. The other man spent his first post-presidency avoiding prosecution, and his second presidency holding cage fights, selling crypto, and posting about Dumocrats at two in the morning while his staff convened in the Situation Room to manage his Epstein exposure.
Both of these things are happening in the same country in the same week. The country that criminalized opposition to fascism yesterday is opening a library named for a man who ran on hope tomorrow. The country that is paying Iran $300 billion to end a war it didn’t need to start is putting a Maya Lin sculpture in a public park on Juneteenth. The country that is executing people on the open ocean without trial is opening a branch of the Chicago Public Library on the South Side, free to anyone who walks through the door.
America contains multitudes, which is the generous framing. The less generous framing is that it contains Barack Obama and Donald Trump simultaneously, in the same historical moment, and what they each built with the years and the power they were given is a record that does not require annotation.
One of them built a library. On Juneteenth. In the neighborhood.
Go if you can. The sledding hill is free.
That title deserves an award. 👏