During my eight years working at the University of Chicago, I regularly drove past the site and later the construction of the Obama Presidential Center. I found myself wondering why presidential centers exist, who they were built for, and what they're supposed to do. Last week, I finally got to tour the building before it opens to the public on June 19.

Why go this summer

If you are still finalizing your summer travel plans, consider building a trip around a presidential library. After all, the cost of flying overseas has climbed, more Americans are staying closer to home, and the country turns 250 in July.

Inside the Obama Center

The center sits on nineteen acres of Jackson Park, on Chicago’s South Side, most of it free and open to anyone. The museum is an imposing granite tower. Near the top, concrete letters five feet tall spell a passage from Obama’s 2015 Selma speech across two of its corners. There’s a replica of the Oval Office, with the Resolute Desk you can sit behind, and twenty-eight artworks.

Its purpose differs from the centers before it. Earlier presidential libraries are archives of a completed presidency. The Obama Center sets out to do more. The Foundation describes it as a place to explore democracy, telling the nation's story through its first Black president and first lady and the movements behind them. The site was deliberate, the neighborhood where Michelle Obama grew up and Barack Obama organized, and one they hoped to help. It is built to send visitors back out to act: leadership programs, public forums, a public library branch, and a regulation basketball court called Home Court.

How they began

These places have a short history. The first belonged to Franklin Roosevelt, who decided in 1939 that a president’s papers were the country’s property rather than the family’s, and gave his to the government in Hyde Park, New York. Congress made it law in 1955: private money builds the library, and the National Archives runs it. After Nixon, the Presidential Records Act made the papers of every president public property.

Thirteen of these federal libraries exist now, from Hoover in Iowa to George W. Bush in Dallas. The most-visited is Reagan’s, in Simi Valley, whose main draw is an Air Force One you can walk through. The Obama Center is the first to step outside that system. Its records were digitized; the building belongs to a foundation, and there is no Archives reading room inside. Trump has gone further. In his renderings, his planned library is a glass tower in Miami. The newest are private institutions, outside the federal system.

What they’re really for

They look different, but they are all trying to answer the same question. Each is built around a single president, and presidents and their priorities pass through while the country goes on. Walk through any of them long enough, and the focus shifts. You stop thinking about the president and start thinking about the country, along with what we ask of the people we elect, and what we still hope this country can be.

It is worth being reminded that those hopes are held in common, among people who may agree on little else. You can disagree with the president and still take that seriously.

From the top floor of the center, a room called the Sky Room, you look out through the reversed letters of the speech to the University of Chicago campus below. I have always thought it is among the most beautiful campuses anywhere. I drove toward it for eight years. It was strange to look back at it from the top of the building I had watched go up.