The city where President Obama got his political start is putting up a strong fight to bring his post-White House legacy to the city, with five separate Chicago entities planning to submit bids to house his presidential library, Pantagraph reports.
Among the bidders are Chicago’s Brownsville neighborhood, Chicago State University, University of Illinois at Chicago, real estate developer Dan McCaffery, and the University of Chicago, where Obama served as a law professor and first lady Michelle Obama as an administrator.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s former White House chief of staff, has not indicated a favorite location among the bidders, but he agrees that the library should be located somewhere on the South Side of the city, where the president served as a community organizer.
In addition to the five bidders in Chicago, also pushing to house the presidential library are New York’s Columbia University, where Obama attended undergrad, and Hawaii, the president’s birthplace.