'He's bigger than Elvis': inside the new Obama Presidential Centre in Chicago

California has Disneyland, Florida has Disney World, but the neighbourhoods south of Chicago's CBD are Obama-World. "He's bigger than Elvis round here," the waitress serving me the former US president's preferred breakfast order at his favourite cafe, Valois Restaurant in Hyde Park, informs me. That's fried egg whites, turkey sausage, hash browns and wheat toast - although I'm having the yolks ... who doesn't eat the yolks? I pass a cardboard cut-out of the former president in a burrito shop (Obama's favourite burrito shop, apparently) to get here, and his regular barber (or so it says out front), and the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream shop where Obama and his then-wife-to-be had their first date (and alleged first kiss). It's a Subway now.

They just opened the big fancy Obama Presidential Centre across the road at the 223-hectare Jackson Park, but these South Side neighbourhoods were already a living, breathing tribute to America's first black president, who lived here for two decades prior to the White House. And to his wife, Michelle, who was raised here. They still own a home here.

It's a sign of the couple's popularity that tickets ($US30 or $42 each) to the centre's piece de resistance - its museum - are booked out months in advance. When I receive mine, I'm given a date and an exact time to arrive, to handle the flow of admirers. Regardless of your political affiliation, the Obama Presidential Centre is impressive. It's built across eight hectares and isn't a single building, it's an entire campus; and aside from the museum - which features four vaulted floors of exhibition space - everything else is free, requiring no pre-booking.

There's a public library, and restaurants and walking trails and playgrounds - even a basketball court - but you must come for its museum. It's a multimedia trip back through the Obama years, though it reaches far beyond that, through America's long, chequered civil rights history. The former president's most memorable speeches are replayed here across entire walls - some four storeys high. His frustrations with America are in plain sight; like the tears he shed failing to initiate gun restrictions in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, when 20 first-graders were killed.

There's a replica of the White House's Oval Office, the most media-exposed outfits worn by the first lady and every kind of memorabilia from the president's two successful campaign trails. But it's a sense of something I can't quite put my finger on which lingers longest. It's hope - I smile at the beaming smiles frozen on faces as patrons watch and read and remember - and it's a lack of it, too (there are plenty of tears). "My son grew up with this president," a local African American woman tells me. "And now he's just a memory." I'm taken right back to the morning in 2008 in Port Vila (Vanuatu) when hundreds of locals drove back and forth outside my hotel blasting horns and waving American flags when Obama won the election. They'd never been to America, and were unlikely to ever go, but that hardly mattered.

When I'm done, an elevator takes me to the Nelson Mandela Sky Room on the top floor to gaze through a ceiling art installation made with words from Obama's 2015 speech commemorating the 600 civil rights marchers attacked by law enforcement officers in Selma, Alabama, 50 years before. Far below me lies Lake Michigan - I swear if I squint I can just make out the shoreline of Michigan across the water on this cloudless afternoon - and Chicago's city skyline with its distinctive Neo Gothic and art deco towers.

There's more to see in the centre; but this part of Chicago is as much a testament to Obama, and his vision of a diverse but unified America. There are 77 neighbourhoods in this city, home to more than 150 nationalities, but in 10 years of spending time here (my wife is a Chicagoan) I've never felt more like I'm actually in Chicago, one of the most ethnically diverse big cities in the US. More than 60 per cent of the locals here are non-white. There are book stores, cafes, restaurants and art galleries owned by people from all over the world, though its black history is especially prominent. The memory of Obama is everywhere, testament not to his celebrity, but to the years he put in here helping local African Americans with everything from job-training programs to tenants' rights.

The writer was a guest of the Obama Presidential Centre and Choose Chicago