Commerative plaque marking the spot where the Obamas shared their first kiss. |
Photos courtesy of The Center for New Media |
News anchor Lester Holt for an interview before delivering his farewell address as president in 2017.
Near 53rd Street and Dorchester Avenue in Chicago’ s Hyde Park neighborhood, a plaque on a granite boulder marks the site where Obama and Michelle Robinson— the woman who would become his wife— shared their first kiss in 1989. The spot was once a Baskin- Robbins ice cream shop and is now part of a small shopping center. The marker, installed in 2012, commemorates the moment that began one of America’ s most famous love stories.
And threading through this section of The Windy City is the University of Chicago, where Obama taught constitutional law for a dozen
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years, from 1992 to 2004, and where Michelle Obama, a South Side daughter, born and raised in South Shore, built her career. She rose to a vice presidency at the University of Chicago Medical Center, working on the fraught, essential relationship between a powerful institution and the Black neighborhoods around it.
The Jackson Park Neighbors
Tara Madison is an insurance broker who moved to Woodlawn sixteen years ago from the Near North Side, and was welcomed onto her block by tenant associations and the block club within days of arriving. When the Obama Foundation decided on Jackson Park in 2016 as the site of the Obama Presidential Center, she joined the Community Benefits Agreement coalition, the alliance of South Side organizers, that demanded
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