The Obama Presidential Center, which opened its doors to the public last Friday in Jackson Park, brings a world-class institution to the Hyde Park and Woodlawn area. The New York Times ranked Hyde Park No. 27 on its list of 52 places to visit in 2026. This is the vision taking shape.
The Obama center is not arriving alone. Three blocks south, the Woodlawn Central megadevelopment — led by the Apostolic Church of God — is moving through the city planning process.
The area is being reshaped in multiple directions.
And yet, there is this unfortunate news: Marshalls at 5102 S. Lake Park Ave., north of Jackson Park, closed on May 9, with a statement about “real estate strategies.” The store, which opened alongside Whole Foods in 2016 and anchored commercial life in this part of the neighborhood for a decade, is gone. It was not the first. Ulta Beauty departed from the same stretch last summer.
Notably, Marshalls parent company TJX Companies reported a 7% increase in net sales last year.
A neighbor of mine who lives above the Whole Foods store described what she observed over many months. In late March, a group of teenagers caused significant property damage in the area. In April, parents and Kenwood Academy Principal Karen Calloway walked 53rd Street together in response, a positive display. The underlying tension, though, remained.
Here is the bind. A guard at the entrance, cameras above the shelves, a police cruiser idling at the curb. For a potential offender, it may be a deterrent. For an ordinary shopper deciding whether to stop in, those can be reasons to keep walking. The security measures deployed to manage disorder can themselves become part of the problem.
Reducing crime statistics and making a neighborhood feel safe are not the same project. Conflating them is a mistake that urban planners, retailers and city officials keep making.
As a civil engineer, I know this: Retail follows the conditions of the public realm. A national chain with rising profits does not walk away from a location because of a bad quarter. It walks away when its calculus of risk no longer adds up. Ulta Beauty left. Marshalls left. They form a pattern, and patterns have causes.
Joseph Schwieterman, a professor of public policy and planning at DePaul University, noted last year in The DePaulia that the Obama center “turbocharges the gentrification discussion.” He added: “It’s unfair to attribute most of the rental increases to the library itself, but it’s certainly a factor.”
The data bears this out. A sweeping investigation published this month by WBEZ found that since the Obama center was announced in 2015, the median sale price of single-family homes in Woodlawn has jumped 4.6 times. The city’s 2020 Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance, designed to shield longtime residents from exactly this kind of displacement, fell short in practice; some programs went largely unimplemented. Even the alderman overseeing the area has acknowledged that Hyde Park residents are feeling similar pressures: rents rising and property values climbing. If the construction of a presidential library generated this scale of speculative pressure, what should residents expect once the doors actually open?
These are not hypothetical concerns. They are already happening, block by block, lease by lease, storefront by storefront.
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The parents and school leaders who walked 53rd together in April understood something that city planners often miss. What they did was not simply a safety intervention. It was an act of ownership. That example should not be left to stand alone. Residents of Hyde Park and Woodlawn can demand something concrete from the city: that the housing protections designed for Woodlawn in 2020, which fell short in practice, be extended and properly funded for Hyde Park as well. Claiming a neighborhood is not only a matter of living in it. It is the sum of daily decisions — where you spend, who you call and what you demand.
That is the irony. The center was designed as a hub for change, but as that change is debated and celebrated, the retail fabric that longtime residents have relied on is quietly unraveling. Everything is being made ready for visitors. What is being made ready for the people who already live here?
Asking this question is not a diminishment of what June 19 means. Hyde Park and Woodlawn have earned this library. But the library has also earned these neighborhoods, in full, not just its showcase version.
Yunus Emre Tozal is a civil engineer in Chicago and a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union.
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