After 10 years of planning, construction and setbacks, former President Barack Obama’s presidential center will finally open to the public next summer.
During an interview in Arkansas on Monday, Obama announced that the center — located on the South Side of Chicago — will begin welcoming visitors in June.
“We’re going to open in June so that y’all don’t have to bring your coats up,” the former two-term president said. “Just letting you know.”
In 2015, Obama announced his library would be built in Chicago, his home for more than two decades. Construction began in 2021, but it was slowed by legal problems.
In a lawsuit, an environmentalist group argued the city had illegally given land in Jackson Park, a leafy refuge on the shore of Lake Michigan, to the Obama Foundation. The suit was tossed by a federal judge in 2022.
With a price tag of $800 million, raised through private donations, it will be the most expensive presidential library ever erected. Sitting on a sprawling 20 acres, it is set to include an array of buildings, gardens and parkland.
The most prominent feature is a 225-foot concrete tower — described by some as a monolith — which will house a museum, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.
On Monday, Obama said he hopes the complex will be “a place where the public gathers for a range of things that puts them face to face with each other and gets them to meet and be in dialogue.”
He noted that the center will offer a wide range of experiences and amenities for people of all ages.
The campus will feature a museum with exhibits on the military and former first lady Michelle Obama’s fashion, alongside a branch of the Chicago Public Library, recording studios and classrooms for educational programming.
“Our goal has been to train the next generation of leaders,” he said. “Because it’s my view that we underinvest in civic leadership and talent.”
The massive, multi-faceted center has sparked a range of reactions from locals and members of the broader public.
“We have never seen anything like this,” a neighborhood woman said in a video released by the Obama Foundation. “I’m just overjoyed.”
“I’m a big book worm,” a young boy added, “So I feel like I wanna go to the library and I wanna see what President Obama’s taste was and what books he liked.”
Other residents slammed the complex as a vanity project and an eyesore — with one describing it to The Daily Mail as “the Tower of Babel.”
President Donald Trump, himself a fan of classical architecture, also weighed in. In October, he called the center “not too pretty.”
Currently, there are 16 presidential libraries and museums throughout the U.S., documenting presidents from Herbert Hoover to Joe Biden, according to the National Archives.
Texas has the distinction of hosting the largest number of presidential libraries: those of Lyndon B. Johnson, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
“Presidential Libraries and Museums hold vast archives of documents, feature museums full of important Presidential artifacts, present compelling educational and public programs, and host informative websites,” the archives’ website states.
Obama’s center will be unlike the others, though. It will be the only presidential library not to be operated in conjunction with the National Archives. Instead, the archives will house Obama’s White House records in a purely digital format.
