By Renee Hickman and Steve Gorman
CHICAGO, June 18 (Reuters) – Throngs of guests were due to converge on a lakefront park in Chicago on Thursday to dedicate the Obama Presidential Center, a sprawling campus of granite, nature and art designed as a hub of civic life and culture honoring the 44th president of the United States.
Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama were expected to preside over the ceremonial opening of the center, an $850 million development that local historians say marks the greatest single investment in a century in the city’s long-neglected South Side.
Money for the center, which opens to the public on Friday — the Juneteenth holiday celebrating the abolition of slavery in the U.S. — was raised privately through the former first couple’s Chicago-based nonprofit Obama Foundation.
Among the A-list recording artists slated to perform at Thursday’s grand opening were Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Common, Christina Aguilera, Eddie Vedder, Bono and the Roots.
Apart from dignitaries, music stars and other invited guests attending the dedication itself, a crowd of ticketed guests will watch the ceremony on a big screen from another park near the center. The proceedings will also be carried on a global livestream.
The Obama Center, occupying 19.3 acres of historic Jackson Park on the banks of Lake Michigan, is an ambitious blend of landscaping and architecture encompassing such elements as a playground, gardens, a concert hall and NBA-sized basketball court.
The center, much of which celebrates advancements in civil rights and Obama’s place in history as the first Black politician elected U.S. president, comes as his immediate successor, President Donald Trump, has rolled back civil liberties protections and diversity programs.
HOPE THEME CENTRAL TO LEGACY
“At a time when there’s so much toxicity in the air, this kind of breathes new hope,” said Valerie Jarrett, the longest-serving senior White House adviser in Obama’s administration and the chief executive of the Obama Foundation. “You can come here and be inspired and hope again.”
Hope, a word prominently displayed in sculpture near the entrance to the main building, was a resonant theme of Obama’s 2008 White House campaign that the Obamas clearly want to be synonymous with their legacy.
Organizers have said they expect the Obama Center, most of which will be open to the public free of charge, to draw 750,000 to 1 million visitors a year.
EIGHT-STORY GRANITE CENTERPIECE
The centerpiece is a museum devoted to Obama’s personal story and his two terms as president, from 2009 to 2017. The design of the museum, an eight-story, irregularly shaped granite-clad tower, has drawn mixed reviews in a city renowned for bold and varied architecture. It already has been nicknamed the Obamalisk, but also has been described as evoking the shape of four hands coming together and reaching upward.
An excerpt from Obama’s favorite speech, delivered in Selma, Alabama, on the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is rendered as a sunscreen-like embellishment of block text wrapping around an upper corner of the museum.
Other major components of the site include a Great Lawn for casual summer picnics and winter sledding; a new branch of the Chicago Public Library; a fruit and vegetable garden named for Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the wife of the 32nd U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was a major Democratic Party figure in her own right; an outdoor plaza honoring late civil rights leader and U.S. lawmaker John Lewis, who led the “Bloody Sunday” march; an athletic center dubbed Home Court; and a multimedia performance and programming space called the Forum.
The campus also features 28 original art works. A network of interconnecting pathways and green space planted with 900 native trees is open to adjacent park land.
The site builds on Jackson Park design features that were first laid out by famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1871 and later served as the grounds for the 1893 World’s Fair.
The Obama Center’s architects were Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, New York veterans known for such projects as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago.
(Reporting by Renee Hickman in Chicago; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Emily Schmall in Chicago; Editing by Donna Bryson and Matthew Lewis)
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