Obamas greet first visitors at new presidential center in Chicago
Barack and Michelle Obama surprised opening-day guests at the Obama Presidential Center as the South Side campus began welcoming the public.
By Maya Lindqvist · Senior Technology Correspondent
3 min read
Barack and Michelle Obama personally welcomed the first 100 people inside the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on Friday, The Associated Press reported. The surprise greeting marked the public opening of a South Side campus that includes a presidential museum, civic spaces and a Chicago Public Library branch.
The opening took place on Juneteenth, according to AP, and followed a dedication ceremony attended by three former presidents, former first ladies, politicians, celebrities, musicians, athletes and other guests. Thousands of people also watched a livestream from a nearby park, AP reported.
During the first-day events, the Obamas joined actor and former “Reading Rainbow” host LeVar Burton to read Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” to 25 schoolchildren at the library branch inside the center, according to AP. When Barack Obama read the line about being “king of all the wild things,” Michelle Obama added, “Although there were no kings,” drawing applause, AP reported.
Visitors later met the former president and former first lady in the center’s Hope and Change lobby, AP reported. The gathering took place near a 38-foot-tall painting showing a map of Chicago, a work AP described as drawing on Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem that called the city “stormy, husky, brawling” and the “City of the Big Shoulders.”
One of the first guests, 18-year-old Houefa Agassounon of Chicago, told AP the encounter was overwhelming. “It was perfect. It was great,” she said, adding that she cried and asked for a hug.
Agassounon had written to the Obama Foundation last year asking to attend the opening, AP reported. She told AP that meeting the Obamas made the day more than she had expected, calling it “the greatest thing” of her 18 years.
The center sits in a lakefront park on Chicago’s South Side, near the neighborhood where the Obamas lived and where Barack Obama began his political career, according to AP. The campus is next to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and near the University of Chicago.
AP reported that public tickets are already unavailable through the end of November. A full weekend of events is planned across the campus.
The site includes a museum tower focused on the public and personal lives of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, and Michelle Obama, according to AP. Other areas open to the public include a playground, an athletic center, basketball courts and a picnic area with grills.
The tower’s form is intended to suggest four hands coming together, AP reported. Along one side, 5-foot concrete capital letters display an excerpt from Obama’s 2015 speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, beginning with the words, “You are America.”
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.