Arts & Entertainment
Storytelling and Social Justice are the Heart and Soul of Chicago’s New National Public Housing Museum
The exterior of the National Public Housing Museum. (Courtesy of the National Public Housing Museum)
The new National Public Housing Museum is “unlike any museum that you’ve been to,” according to Executive Director Lisa Yun Lee.
Founded by residents, it is the first cultural institution to interpret the American experience via public housing, and it’s housed in the last surviving building of the Jane Addams Homes built in 1937 on Chicago’s Near West Side.
The grand opening this weekend will be a celebration with music, art and a side of social justice.
For one former resident, it’s like traveling back in time.
“It’s surreal in a way to walk in here today,” said the Rev. Marshall Hatch, who lived here throughout the 1960s. “This is my neighborhood, my childhood. This is where my best friends were. This is where my birthday parties were.”
Storytelling is a key component of the space, and a community-based archive of oral histories is already growing.
Crystal Palmer, vice chair of the museum, grew up in the Henry Horner Homes. She worked on this project through a long gestation period of 18 years.
“Back in the ‘60s, families were really close-knit,” Palmer said. “I spent a lot of time here because my grandmother, aunts and uncles lived here.”
Artifacts in the National Public Housing Museum. (Marc Vitali / WTTW News)
Donated artifacts are embedded across the museum — from LPs and quilts to personal items from a boxing champ and a Supreme Court justice.
“The building is our biggest artifact,” Lee said. “It was saved by public housing residents.”
One charming addition is the reinstallation of the Animal Court, a group of kid-friendly sculptures made in the 1930s by Chicago artist Edgar Miller. When WTTW News toured the museum before the opening, the art-deco creatures stood in a common area that was still a hardhat zone.
Seeing the restored animals he used to climb on as a child, Hatch said: “It’s just magical to see them again.”
Elsewhere there’s a music room filled with albums from artists who grew up in public housing. There’s an art gallery, and there’s a nod to “Good Times,” the Norman Lear-produced TV show with John Amos and Esther Rolle that was set in Chicago public housing.
The museum is free to the public, but there is a fee to visit the three fully furnished historic apartments with a tour guide or “museum ambassador.” The apartments include the home of a Jewish family from the 1930s and the home of an African American family in the 1960s (Hatch’s family, in fact).
The “Good Times” exhibit inside the National Public Housing Museum. (Percy Ollie Jr. / Ollie Photography Inc.)
As a onetime resident of nearby Taylor Street, this reporter asked about the stigma of public housing, telling these former residents that I was advised by neighbors to stay away from the Addams Homes when I lived locally in the late 1980s.
“Nothing happened on Taylor Street, remember that,” Palmer said. “Even though we had public housing on this side and that, nothing happened. The only thing I can remember happening is that there was a mob hit. This is Little Italy.”
“There’s so many stigmas about public housing,” said Palmer, who works in community engagement for the Chicago Housing Authority. “Like people that lived here had horns and tails. But we’re people like anybody in the suburbs. There are great people who lived here and had impact in the community — musicians, doctors, lawyers. Just because you lived in public housing doesn’t mean you’re from an alien planet.”
She added: “We had to thrive because of the stereotype that they put on us. We had to make it to show others that they, too, can make it.”
Lee said the museum is a “site of conscience” that challenges “systemic injustices which contributed to the deferred dreams of so many.”
“The message that this museum proclaims,” Hatch said, “is that ultimately housing is a human right.”
The ribbon-cutting of the National Museum of Public Housing is at 11 a.m. Friday. For a full lineup of activities on the museum’s grand opening weekend, visit nphm.org.
Records on display inside the National Public Housing Museum. (Percy Ollie Jr. / Ollie Photography Inc.)
Marc Vitali is the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent.
