Is there anything more hopeful or emblematic of change than a garden in its first scraggly youth? Only a playground, perhaps. Magnificent versions of both grace the new Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. The soil remains exposed for now and shade is still scarce, but there’s plenty of lushness to come. Entering from the straight-arrow formality of the Midway Plaisance, I was happy to follow sinuous pathways around copses, arbors, and flowered hillocks. The kids’ area made me wish I were small enough to test my agility on all the complicated apparatuses. In the winter, I might have hurled myself down the artificial hill, created to provide a flat neighborhood with topography so Chicago’s youth no longer had to go without sledding, the way Michelle Obama did when she was growing up nearby. (I did brave the long slide draped over the other side of the playground and landed on its rubbery surface with adult force.)
If the Obama center were just the park and playground, plus the alluring new branch of the Chicago Public Library that’s tucked beneath a landscaped terrace, it would be a nicely modest gesture from a president with an evident fondness for kids and the outdoors, a local gem worthy of local coverage. But at the heart of this 19-acre campus (larger, that is, than the World Trade Center complex or Lincoln Center) is a baleful stone megalith that, because it’s Obama’s, was national news even before a site was chosen. Infiltrate the walls and you find yourself in a dimly lit multistory shrine to the president as prophet.
