Sout’
vs. West. I have heard countless diatribes from black people who live in those
parts of Chicago who will insist that their part of the city is the reality
that tells you what Chicago is truly all about.
IT
IS A dispute that can get more intense than the South vs. North arguments that
crop up during baseball season. It also is one that has developed its character
into the debate over where a future library and museum for President Barack
Obama should be located.
Two
of the four sites under consideration are in Chicago, although I wonder if the
inability of the city to get behind one site is what will make the New York
City proposal the ultimate winner.
Will
the South and West side interests wind up dumping all over each other and make
it easier for Columbia University to achieve its desire of housing the Obama
presidential legacy for decades to come?
Now
I know some people are convinced there’s no way Obama, an adopted Chicagoan,
and first lady Michelle, a South Shore neighborhood native, could possibly
consider a place other than Chicago for his legacy. I’d like to believe that’s
true.
BUT
THERE ARE those who would like the appeal of New York, and would argue the fact
that Obama actually attended Columbia (he transferred from Occidental College
in Los Angeles to earn his bachelor’s degree) ought to put that school on top
of the heap.
Considering
that the Obamas have already indicated they’re not going to hustle back to
Chicago immediately once his presidential term ends in January 2017, our city
may well be just the place they came from.
For
the record, it was the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at
Chicago that put together the competing bids that were submitted Thursday, and
that will be studied between now and mid-January, when the Obamas have
indicated a site will be chosen.
Illinois-Chicago
says a museum sponsored with their assistance could be at either Roosevelt Road
and Kostner Avenue or Harrison and Halsted streets. A CTA “el” stop on Kostner
closed decades ago could be reopened, IF the Roosevelt site is chosen.
WHILE
CHICAGO (AS in the university) says a museum could go near the South Shore
Cultural Center, near Washington Park on King Drive or on Stony Island Avenue
in Jackson Park.
Chicago’s
sites would be near (as in a short drive away) the University of Chicago
campus, where Obama once served as an instructor in the law school. It would be
a boost to the neighborhoods surrounding Hyde Park, and theoretically would
make the university less of a racial island on the black South Side.
While
Illinois-Chicago’s sites could help bolster the North Lawndale neighborhood
that many outsiders still think of as incurable ghetto. College officials also
stress the fact that, as a public university, they are more likely to get the
kinds of students who don’t fit into some academic and cultural elite.
As
though implying that Flames students are less elitist than the Maroons who hang
out around the Midway!
IT’S
AS THOUGH people will be asked to recognize Chicago South or Chicago West as
being what the Obama legacy is all about. It could make some think that New
York is less of a hassle than the Second City. The ultimate neutral site!
Although
I honestly think that if it didn’t wind up in Chicago, the best spot for an
Obama museum and library might well be the future president’s birthplace in
Honolulu, Hawaii.
The
University of Hawaii (of which his parents were alumni) could literally wind up
having a beachfront site that might make it a place people make the extra trip
to attend.
It
certainly would be a more appealing destination than Grand Rapids, Mich., which
houses the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum.
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