Barack Obama Presidential Center Chicago

If you have ever strolled through Jackson Park on Chicago's South Side and thought, "This lovely bit of green could really do with a 225-foot glass tower and a gift shop", congratulations — your wish has been granted. The Obama Presidential Center has been rising from the parkland for years now, promising museums, libraries, gardens, a sledding hill and enough concrete to make a civil engineer weep with joy. It is, depending on who you ask, either the greatest thing to happen to the neighbourhood since the 1893 World's Fair, or the longest-running building project in the city's history. Possibly both. Chicago has never been a city that does things quietly, and it is certainly not starting now.

A Tower, A Museum, And Enough Star Power To Fill The Skyline

The centre is designed to be many things at once: a museum devoted to the 44th president, a branch of the Chicago Public Library where you can borrow a paperback and a bit of history in the same visit, a public plaza, an athletic facility and a garden that will presumably grow vegetables with better security than most heads of state. The main tower is the showpiece — tall, glassy and unmissable, which is handy, because the traffic on Lake Shore Drive was already doing its best to keep everyone stationary long enough to admire it. Expect tour buses, expect queues, and expect at least one person in every group to say, "I remember when this was just a park."

Getting to this point has been a saga worthy of its own exhibit. There were lawsuits, federal reviews, arguments about trees, arguments about golf, and the sort of planning meetings that make a three-hour film feel brisk. The budget has climbed considerably since the original estimate, which will surprise absolutely nobody who has ever paid for a kitchen extension, let alone a presidential complex. Some local residents have welcomed the jobs and the investment; others have worried loudly about rising rents and being priced out of the very neighbourhood the centre claims to celebrate. Both conversations are still happening, and both are worth having.

What you will actually find on opening day is a campus built into the landscape rather than dropped on top of it, with walking paths, a wetland, a plaza designed for gatherings and a hill that local children will be sledding down before the paint is even dry. The museum itself will hold artefacts from the Obama years — the speeches, the campaigns, the famous tan suit, presumably displayed under glass with a small plaque reading "controversial at the time, beloved in hindsight". There will be a gift shop. There is always a gift shop. It will sell mugs.

So is it worth the wait? Probably, yes. Chicago has a habit of taking its time and then producing something genuinely impressive, and a free-ish cultural landmark on the South Side that pulls visitors past the Museum of Science and Industry and into Hyde Park is not nothing. Bring comfortable shoes, bring patience for the parking situation, and bring a camera. Just do not, under any circumstances, ask a local how long the construction has taken unless you have a spare afternoon and a cup of tea to hand.