It was hot on the August day in 2016 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel presented the Obama Foundation with nearly 20 acres of Jackson Park as the site for the Obama Presidential Center.
Besides, the difference was as clear as the panorama of lagoon and woods stretching before us: Lucas is a moviemaker with no Chicago roots; Obama is the nation’s first Black president, a hometown hero of unprecedented status, nurtured and launched on this very ground.
Preservation Chicago, for example, which has had Jackson Park on its annual list of the city’s seven “Most Endangered” places for the last four years, is now advocating, not only for the relocation of the OPC out of the park, but for the entire lakefront park system to become a protected National Park or Monument, like the Indiana Dunes or the Pullman Historic District.
POP’s also attempting to take its legal case, led by Hoover Institution fellow (Wait—there couldn’t be anything political about this, right?) and UChicago law professor emeritus Richard Epstein, to the Supreme Court.
