By Richard Magat

Jun. 10, 2015:  For a few split seconds in May, perhaps, some Bronxville residents may have pinched themselves in disbelief. Our village was chosen to be the site of the Barack Obama Presidential Library?

How could that be, since there were at least three major competitors for the site--Hawaii, where he was raised; New York, where he spent a few years as a student at Columbia; and Chicago, where he built his political career.

As it turns out, the choice was a sociological, to say the least, glitch. The Obama library will be built in a portion of the South Side of Chicago known as Bronzeville, a center of African-American culture from the 1920s through the l950s.

Though small, at its peak it housed more than 300,000 in a narrow seven-mile strip. The pulsing energy of Bronzeville was located at the crowded corners of 35th and State Street and 47th Street and South Parkway Boulevard (later renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Drive). Nearby are the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Illinois College of Optometry.

The neighborhood's Wabash YMCA is credited as the birthplace of the commemoration of black culture that later become Black History Month. Although Bronzeville was a center of black culture such as jazz, blues, and gospel music, it was also notorious for the huge public housing project the Robert Taylor Homes--so wretched that it was razed in the late 1990s.

Apart from their historical and scholarly value, presidential libraries are tourist attractions. The most popular are the Reagan, Kennedy, and Clinton libraries, though FDR's home in Hyde Park is a revered venue.

Attendance at libraries of presidents who had low approval ratings, e.g., Hoover and Nixon, is comparably low. To say nothing of William Henry Harrison, who died in 1841, one month after taking office.

For the record, there is only one Bronxville in the United States, and one Bronzeville.

Photo by N. Bower