By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
The Obama Presidential Center is finally open, on South Stony Island in Chicago.
June 19 marked a gala opening day with four former residents of the Oval Office in attendance, along with their respective wives, enabling a happy photo of the eight of them to dominate the news stories instead of actual photos of the building they were supposed to be celebrating.
The Obama Presidential Center is a brutalist structure of pre-fab concrete, topped with a massive string of unreadable block lettering – which we are given to believe is an excerpt from one of the bestselling Obama memoirs that libraries and schools bought by the case but presumably, nobody actually read.
Architectural criticism is largely subjective, as is most criticism, but we take our architecture more seriously here in Chicago than they do in many places, so it’s a meaningful issue here, well worth pondering.
Despite the city’s general degradation in recent decades, Chicago has long been known as the city of skyscrapers.
Its beautiful skyline on Lake Michigan boasts the works of many of the world’s greatest architects – William LeBaron Jenney, Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Helmut Jahn, Daniel Burnham, and Graham and Khan. Chicago may be the only city where you can overhear regular folks argue the relative merits of architects, with the same fervor that they use when discussing the best pizzerias, Italian beef or gyros shops.
When Chicago gets a new building, the architect’s renderings are shared with delight. We may have crippling taxes, crushing traffic congestion, lethal neighborhoods and a shrinking tax base, but darn it, we can still be proud of our architecture, our theatre, and our cuisine.
To say that the Obama center was a let-down for any proud Chicagoan’s spirit is putting it mildly.
You might not know it to look at us, but Chicagoans tend to be more open-minded, more patient, than you might expect. We saw the renderings and couldn’t quite believe it at first. We saw the photos while it was going up, and we told ourselves to give it a chance.
It’s a Chicago building, after all; surely it will look better when it’s painted, or when it’s clad in marble – that must be what they plan, right? Or maybe the landscaping will make all the difference. Imagine a frustrated bride trying on a hideous bridal gown, and desperately hoping that the veil, train, or gloves will somehow transform the thing from pumpkin to chariot.
But the center finally opened – way over budget and way behind schedule – and if anything, it turned out to be even more hideous than we expected. The comparisons online and in the press ran the gamut from “a giant dumpster” to “a concentration camp guard tower.” Virtually nothing positive was written about it because there truly is nothing good to say about it. One can hardly imagine such failure; perhaps the only explanation is that it was intentional, a final, vulgar insult to the city that foolishly handed this socialist carpetbagger a political career.
But to the surprise of many, neither the hideousness of the building nor the celebrity status of the honored guests was to capture the headlines after this opening. The news story that shocked unsuspecting readers was the number of lawsuits from contractors who have allegedly been stiffed by the center’s building committee.
Like far too many public programs, the little 8-story Obama Presidential Center was saddled with a budget that grew much bigger than its original promise. The final number reported in June was about $850 million, an amazing price for a relatively small and incredibly ugly structure.
For comparison, the magnificent Trump International Tower, 100 gleaming stories of steel and glass, built just 15 years earlier in Chicago’s much pricier Magnificent Mile (right where Michigan Avenue crosses the Chicago River, alongside two true Chicago landmarks, the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building) also cost $850 million.
Yes, that’s right – both structures have the same price tag.
You would assume that you would get a lot more for your money in the abandoned and dangerous far south side of Chicago, which commercial developers have avoided like the plague for generations, than you would get in downtown Chicago, which ranks as some of the priciest real estate in the country, but you would be mistaken.
Ask any hundred people you meet: If you had $850 million to spend, and you could have either one, the skyscraper on the Magnificent Mile or the little office center and gymnasium on South Stony Island, which one would you choose? Trust me, the results won’t even be close.
That’s how much of a flop this monstrosity is. And yet, despite only having been open for a week, already the place is beset with scandal.
The project was sold to the community – despite massive opposition from all sides, originally – as a huge influx of construction jobs for the community. When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a building project, that money doesn’t all go to an architect; the vast majority gets spread around among small businesses, employing building materials vendors and plumbers, drywallers and carpenters, electricians and glaziers, carpet layers and escalator installers.
This should have been a godsend for the area; it simply wasn’t.
According to the African American Contractors Association, there’s a long list of such small businesses who have been working on this place for years and haven’t been paid a cent. Adamson Plumbing, II In One Concrete, and a host of other contractors have overextended themselves in buying materials and paying their laborers, without ever being paid by the Obama Foundation.
Most of these contractors are under a non-disclosure agreement and are therefore unable to go on the record by name; they have to either wait and hope, or hire lawyers to sue. Numerous lawsuits against the presidential deadbeats are reported to be in the seven and eight figures, often allegedly caused by sheer incompetence by the Obama Foundation and their top tier of general contractors, due to sloppy specs and the countless change orders necessary to fix design errors.
When pressed for quotes, the center and its primary general contractor, Lakeside Alliance, dismiss the allegation with the claim that this is a big project and big projects always have such problems. The problem with that answer is, No, this project really isn’t all that big, frankly, for Chicago, the city of big buildings, and also, No, actual professionals – who know what they’re doing – really don’t have this number of contractor disputes. It really looks like either incompetence or fraud, or both.
The end result of building this thing in Chicago will likely be the bankruptcy of perhaps dozens of companies, and the ruination of family businesses and entrepreneurs. One would have expected them to write the checks well in advance of the opening to avoid such negative publicity, but by all accounts, they haven’t even tried to make it right. The entitlement of the elites who run the Obama Presidential Center is such that they have little interest in managing the nightmare they’ve created for so many hundreds of people in their own community.
Tragically, this could have been predicted, if anyone had asked, but few do. Democrats in Chicago assume that they are allies, and could never imagine that they’d be stiffed by members of their “community.” How wrong they are.
In fact, the list of contractors who’ve been cheated or even bankrupted by doing business with Democrats is a long one, and it goes back decades. Companies try to avoid slamming political parties by going public, but as the Badger Institute reported in a careful review in advance of Milwaukee’s hosting of the 2020 DNC, Democrat party conventions are notorious for leaving millions in printing, advertising, hotel, and catering bills unpaid. When called on it, the pols have been known to sneer “well, just think of it as a contribution.” That’s just how too many DNC bosses tend to think.
If the mainstream press did their job and reported such stories with the fervor that they shower on Republican shortcomings, it’s unlikely that any contractor would ever accept business from a Democrat project on anything but a 100% cash-in-advance basis.
But we still haven’t come to the biggest question: the Obama Presidential Center is on nineteen acres of land, which they didn’t even have to purchase; Chicago politicians engineered a 99-year lease for a nominal cost – a single ten dollar bill – so that they’d have the use of the land for free, for a century. Yes, you read that right: Nineteen acres in Chicago for free.
Usually, the price of the land and its property taxes are a big part of any large construction project. A business doesn’t start collecting rents or sales or ticket purchases until after it opens, and must spend the years of construction paying for the costs of building and the cost of the real estate.
But in this case, thanks to generous local connections at City Hall, the Obama Foundation didn’t have to worry about those normally immense real estate costs, freeing up their capital to properly do a “pay as you go” process with the construction contractors.
Of all the questions that plague us about this Obama Foundation project, the biggest has to be this one: If they raised $850 million, and they got the land for free, and yet, they still aren’t paying their contractors, Where the heck did all that money go?
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
