Photo courtesy of The Obama Foundation tribute to the life and work of this nation’ s first Black president.
What Clark and many of the other South Side residents that I interviewed think about its opening is a complicated mix of hopefulness and pride.
The Neighborhood Before the Monument
The Obama Presidential Center did not rise out of Jackson Park by accident. These were the very streets that made the man whose name is on the building.
Barack Obama arrived in Chicago in 1985, a 23-year-old community organizer who, by his own telling at the Center’ s dedication in June, came to Jackson Park not knowing a soul in the city. What he found on the South Side over the next two decades was everything he needed to propel him into the White House: a church, a wife, a family, a career, and purposeful life.“ All the strands of my life came together” in Chicago, he said when he announced, in 2015, that his presidential library would be built in this place where he came of age. You can still walk those“ strands” today. Start at 5046 South Greenwood Avenue, the handsome red-brick Georgian Revival house the Obamas bought in 2005, in Kenwood, just across the invisible border from Hyde Park, opposite a Byzantine-domed synagogue. The concrete barriers that sealed the block during Obama’ s White House years have been partially removed, allowing you to walk the street.
At the Hyde Park Hair Salon on South Blackstone Avenue, Barack Obama was a regular for many years before and during his presidency with his longtime barber, Zariff. The salon preserved the chair Obama used, displaying it behind a glass case, as a reminder of how a local figure became a global one.
A few blocks north, at 1518 East 53rd Street, is Valois, the cash-only,“ see-your-food” cafeteria that is, more than any other restaurant in the city, the culinary shrine of the forty-fourth presidency. A“ President Obama’ s Favorites” menu hangs inside, offering his combinations— the egg whites, the turkey sausage, the hash browns, the wheat toast etc. It was to Valois, not a television studio, that Obama brought NBC
As he looked out at the crowd of young kids, families, tour groups, and visitors who have flown in from across the country and beyond, Clark said the area has gone“ from a dead neighborhood to a live neighborhood. This is the new downtown.”
Then he laughed at himself.“ I feel like I’ m doing a commercial.”
Photo courtesy Barack Obama / Instagram
He isn’ t. This is the general feeling of residents in Jackson Park, which is now home to this 19.3-acre living
Obama and longtime barber Zariff in Dec. 2025
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