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Former President Barack Obama’s much-maligned presidential center will officially open in June in Chicago after years of delays and protests, the former president revealed.
“We’re going to open in June so that y’all don’t have to bring your coats up,” Obama said during a visit to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas on Monday, without revealing a firm opening date, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The presidential center has been in the works for more than a decade, with the Obama Foundation announcing the site on Chicago’s South Side back in May 2015. The center, which will include the presidential library, was projected to open in 2021, but has been tied up in lawsuits and federal reviews that have pushed the timeline back years.
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The center will be home to the presidential library, a museum, auditorium, a Chicago Public Library branch, a garden, athletic facility and other attractions on its 20-acre campus.
“We want to create a campus, a place where the public gathers for a range of things that puts them face to face with each other and get them to meet and be in dialogue and conversation and exposed to new ideas with each other,” Obama said on Monday, according to the Chicago Sun -Times.
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The $850 million project in Jackson Park was first hit with a years-long lawsuit in 2018 when a group called Protect Our Parks alleged that Chicago illegally transferred parkland to the private Obama Foundation. That court battle persisted until 2022, when a federal judge terminated a revised version of the suit.
The planned construction also sparked federal reviews as the project required an overhaul of roads in the area and due to Jackson Park being listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Such reviews did not wrap up until late 2020, local media reported at the time.
Protests have cropped up outside the center’s site and elsewhere in Chicago as residents sounded off that it might price them out of their homes on the South Side, while also calling it a “monstrosity,” Fox News Digital previously reported. Locals have mocked the building by calling it “The Obamalisk,” according to the New York Post, with area artists critiquing the building’s brutalist architectural style.
“I always see it as a cenotaph, a tombstone, a crusader fortress in brutalist style,” one art historian told the outlet in November.
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Meanwhile, the Obama Foundation has celebrated the center as “a lively community hub, economic anchor, and beacon of democracy right here on the South Side of Chicago.”
A groundbreaking ceremony for the project was not held until 2021, with construction picking up in earnest in the last year.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Obama Foundation for any additional comment on the center’s opening day, but did not immediately receive a reply.
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