For Obama's Home Town, It's Not Goodbye

At Medici on 57th, in Barack Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago, the waitstaff's shirts tout the restaurant's most famous customer. (By Carlos Javier Ortiz For The Washington Post)

"There is an enormous sense of proprietorship here in anybody who hits it nationally, and no one more so than the president-elect," said Scott Turow, a best-selling novelist and essayist who was born in Chicago and still lives here. "As Chicagoans see it, the Obamas will be the first citizens of this city forever."

In Obama's Hyde Park stomping grounds, Chicagoans said they feel proud that one of their own is moving to the White House and confident that he will never lose touch with the city. At 57th Street Books, a cooperative store that has counted the Obamas as co-owners since the 1980s, manager Laura Prail said she is sad that they may stop coming in.

"They're a great book family," she said, adding that Barack Obama would spend hours looking for mystery thrillers and nonfiction titles in the wood-shelved nooks and crannies of her cozy, brick-walled basement shop. "Early in the campaign, there was a picture in the New York Times of him standing on a tarmac with a book in his hand, Fareed Zakaria's 'The Post-American World.' I looked it up, and he bought it here."

Prail said she hopes the president-elect calls with orders to ship to the White House. But she added, only half-joking, "I'm a little jealous of Politics and Prose," the independent Washington bookstore.

A few doors down at Medici on 57th, an intimate neighborhood cafe famous for its lemonade and burgers, longtime waitress Denise Hall, who has served Obama brunch many weekends, said he will be back. "He's not really leaving," Hall said, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with "Obama Eats Here." "And I'm not saying this because they're great tippers, which they are. I like the Obamas."

The Walgreens down the street has become a veritable Obama merchandise headquarters: Obama hats, T-shirts and hoodies, Obama commemorative plates, framed posters and pennants, Obama key chains and mugs, Obama books and magazines. "This is big-time excitement," said longtime manager Kevin Crowley, who first met Obama 12 years ago when he was shopping in the pharmacy section.

Even Chicagoans who have never met Obama feel ownership of his story. At Valois, regular customer Duke Faulere, a retired musician, said, "I never knew the man, but I know his calling in life."

"He's only going to work in another location," Faulere added. "He is never saying goodbye."