“How much should the maxims of a 19th-century park designer tie the hands of a 21st-century president?” asks Edward McClelland in his piece “Olmsted vs. Obama: Inside the Pushback Against the Presidential Library” published this week by Chicago Magazine. A whimsical illustration by Graham Roumieu that accompanies the article shows of a ghostly zephyr of Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect of the 1893 World’s Fair, fretting over the fate of his beloved Jackson Park.

The article summarizes the positions for and against the (current) plans for the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park. Quoting Olmsted’s philosophy about public parks, that “you may thus often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile,” McClelland wonders if maybe Olmsted would “be OK with a monument to a great man who just happened to be the first black president?”

Columbian Exposition landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted declared that the building used for the Palace of Fine Art, now home of the Museum of Science and Industry, should forever be the “dominating object of interest” in Jackson Park. [Image from Illustrations from the Art Gallery of the World’s Columbian Exposition Charles M. Kurtz (ed.), George Barrie, 1893.]