I am very excited for this project and the economic catalyst it will be for that area. I am excited to see Cornell Drive taken out, but I am wondering what will the alternate route be? Will Stony Island be widened?

^ Yes, Stony will be widened. Instead of turning off at 57th, traffic from Lake Shore Drive will be directed to stay on LSD further south to Hayes then cut over to Stony. Hayes will be rebuilt similar to LaSalle thru Lincoln Park, with underpasses for pedestrians.

So the turnoff at 57th will be just for the MSI and local traffic. That's good.

Is Tiger Woods' Golf Course design company still planning the Jackason Park/South Shore golf course restoration? I've been wondering if they've been waiting for the Obama Presidential Center to get the go ahead.

I got to image the combo of a PGA level Tiger Woods golf coarse and the Obama Presidential Center will pretty transformative and drive some other development in the area.

I admittedly haven't followed the OPL thread super close over the years but am stoked it's finally coming together. I am curious though, what exactly is the point to closing off 57th like they are planning? I don't really get what that has to do with the library.

They're not closing 57th, they're closing Cornell. If you exit LSD at 57th, you won't be able to zoom around MSI onto Cornell like now. You'll have to sit at a stoplight at the Midway/5900S and turn left onto Stony Island, and then sit through 4 additional stoplights in front of the Obama Center and Hyde Park Academy and a stop sign at 64th before getting to the "superhighway" part of Stony south of Marquette. So you can still exit at 57th to go south, it'll just be a lot slower to go that way than to take the new route via Hayes. More importantly, the new widened Stony Island will have full curb bumpouts, landscaped median, signalized crosswalks etc so it is friendly for pedestrians to cross and access the whole of the park.

What keeps getting forgotten here is that all the roadway changes south of Hayes are not for the Obama Center, but for the privatized mega-golf course that the Park District is planning. Somehow the golf course has not riled up activists because it's not a building, even though it's far more of a problem for gentrification than the Obama Center is. The course that they're building is intended to be expensive and exclusive, unlike the public courses that exist now.

https://i.imgur.com/sUcRq5u.jpg

Ah okay I see it now, thanks for the visual.

In an alternate reality, I imagine a Chicago where the organizers of the 1893 World's Columbian Expo spent a little more money and made permanent buildings instead, and all of that evolved to become the location of the UN instead of NYC. Imagine visiting that today..

I outlined the serious problems with the golf plan above, but yeah this is basically dependent on the OPC.

The golf course plan can't move forward without the roadwork for the OPC that will close certain roads and build underpasses at other roads for pedestrians (and golf carts). After this infrastructure is built, it will allow the joining of the various courses that currently exist.

Yes please.

I'm not seeing how the roadwork plans help join Jackson Park Golf Course with South Shore Golf Course...

Keep in mind that Chicago offered Northerly Island as the home of the UN. Surprisingly, they decided not to spend their winters out in Lake Michigan downwind of the stockyards.

Leaving aside the problem of travel time to Chicago in a pre-jetliner era, Charlene Mires writes in Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations that the site selection committee summarily ruled out all Midwestern locations because of the famous isolationism of the region's newspapers. Obviously, Col. McCormick's Tribune was leader of the pack, having been a loud, steadfast, and influential opponent of US involvement in World War II.

https://i.imgur.com/RgrrnvP.png

The Chicago Tribune, always on the wrong side of history:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/resiz...VA77N4QPJGMKJM

News came through that the Obama Presidential Center will break ground by late summer this year!

https://chicagoyimby.com/2021/02/oba...kson-park.html

Dang I preferred the previous design.

Really?? I think it looked weird, like some sort of ancient Egyptian mastaba:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/architectur...library-02.jpg

https://www.architecture.org/news/ev...ential-center/

The current/final design is more refined, and not as fortress-like:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Ot0k..._2_Plaza.0.jpg

In the final design what is written out on the top left? Is it gibberish

It's just filler gibberish in the rendering of course. It will likely be the Preamble to the Constitution or another such inscription of great national significance.

Part of me hopes that wires get crossed somewhere and we end up with giant stone letters spelling out "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..."

I always thought that was called jabberwocky for some reason. Maybe that was just my professors name for it.