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It’s striking that the groundbreaking for the Obama Presidential Center this week and the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire next week are butting together in history.

They both may be cases of something good coming from a wrenching experience. On a different scale than the fire and its devastating loss of life and property, perhaps the Obama Center can salvage its unsteady beginnings and build better from here.

There are other connections, too, that carry from the conflagration to the Obama Center construction.

After the fire came the rebuilding that led to Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape design for the 1893 World’s Fair; then Daniel Burnham’s Plan for Chicago; the Great Migration of Blacks to the stock yards and steel mills; the blockbusting, poverty and urban rot that followed; the need for community organizers, such as Barack Obama, to fight the structural racism, and the return to Chicago of our 44th president, Obama, to plunge a shovel into Olmsted’s precious sod.

Read more at the chicagotribune.com.

David Greising is the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, joining the BGA in 2018. For nearly a century, the BGA has fought for honest and effective government through investigative journalism and policy advocacy.

Greising’s career started at the City News Bureau of Chicago, with stops at the Chicago Sun-Times, Business Week magazine, the Chicago Tribune and Reuters. He was a co-founder of the Chicago News Cooperative and worked briefly as a consultant to World Business Chicago. Today, Greising writes on government issues in regular columns for the Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business.

Under Greising’s leadership, the BGA has played a key role in uncovering public corruption amidst the wide-ranging federal probe, starting with an in-depth report about Ald. Ed Burke’s conflicts of interest before the federal charges against Burke. The BGA also has exposed waste and fraud at O’Hare and the proliferation of corruption and poverty into Dolton, Lyons and other Chicago suburbs. The BGA’s policy team has led calls for ethics reform in Chicago’s City Council and in state government.