Commentary: The Griffin MSI and Obama center are creating a new chapter on the South Side

We come to this moment from different directions. But today we stand in the same park, seeing the same thing: Something extraordinary is happening on Chicago's South Side.

For almost 100 years, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry has been a place where generations have come together to learn, imagine and see themselves as part of something bigger.

And on June 19, the Obama Presidential Center joins in that tradition, attracting new energy, new visitors and new opportunities to the South Side.

As neighboring institutions that share deep commitments to education, public service and community impact, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and the Obama Presidential Center are already working together to ensure the best start possible for the new museum. The museum will close to the public on June 18 to help the Obama Presidential Center prepare for its grand opening. And then, on June 19 and beyond, we'll jointly welcome thousands of visitors to this singular place - a place that's already full of natural beauty and now will be even more accessible.

Consider what is now available in a single public park. The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry welcomed 1.5 million visitors last year, including more than a quarter million students on field trips. Nearly 9 in 10 of those trips were completely free. For five straight years, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry has been the No. 1 field trip destination in Illinois. On top of that, the Obama Presidential Center will draw an estimated 600,000 museum visitors a year, with programming in arts and culture, civics and democracy, gardening and food, and sports and well-being. It also includes a Chicago Public Library branch, an athletic center and public green space - much of it free.

Access is the word that unites us - not as a mere brochure promise but as design decisions. Both of our institutions are also leading with free admission days, creative spaces and after-school programs that draw young people from the neighborhoods that ring this campus. New public transit routes now run directly to both institutions. And beginning next year, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry will reopen its historic south portico, the original entrance to what was the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition Palace of Fine Arts. This evolution will create a direct, accessible pathway that connects both campuses to each other and to the surrounding neighborhood. Jackson Park itself, long underused, is becoming what it was always meant to be: a destination for everyone.

Our two institutions standing side by side, working together in tandem, connected by a beautiful greenspace and united by our shared values, is creating an opportunity for something our South Side community has needed for generations: investment. Infrastructure. Inclusiveness. A genuine civic, even national, anchor.

Understand, though, this is not a revitalization story. The South Side does not need to be discovered. The people who live here have always known what this place is worth. What this moment represents is an expansion of what is already great into something the entire city can claim.

But this bond of our respective institutions will complement what already makes this stretch of land so special in a city that already has so much - whether it's natural assets, like the Osaka Garden, cherry blossoms, lagoon, Wooded Island and Bobolink Meadow. Or South Side institutions like The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, Frederick C. Robie House or Washington Park.

We're proud to work with these institutions along with small neighborhood businesses to promote, build and support their success. Together, we all represent a strength and sense of civic pride - creating spaces where a family from anywhere in the world can come to see a Chicago that is so much more than just a soaring skyline.

It's where a kid from South Shore or Kenwood can stumble into a science exhibit or lesson about democracy that changes her sense of what's possible, where a visitor from anywhere in the world comes to see Chicago as so much more than just a soaring skyline.

Working side by side, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and the Obama Presidential Center are building on the history, culture and connectedness that have always made the South Side so strong. Come see it as summer arrives. Walk the park. The view from the presidential center's Sky Room down to the lagoon, the expanse from the museum's south portico when the cherry blossoms bloom - it's going to be a new era in Chicago.

And in so many ways, we're just getting started.

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Chevy Humphrey is president and CEO of Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. Valerie Jarrett is chief executive officer of the Obama Foundation.

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This story was originally published June 15, 2026 at 11:03 AM.