New Museum Examines the History of American Public Housing—and the Stories of Its Residents
Located in a preserved 1930s development in Chicago’s West Side, the museum includes three recreated apartments representing families of different decades and demographics
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In the early 2000s, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began to tear down its own public housing units, displacing tens of thousands of residents while promising that it would soon offer them new housing and strong community investment.
That was the goal of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation, an ambitious urban renewal project aimed at erasing the dire conditions of developments like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes in favor of a fresh new vision of public housing.
Two decades later, most of the city’s high-rise public housing developments are gone, but the transformative second half of the project remains unrealized. Vacant lots sprawl where the future was supposed to bloom.
Narratives of institutional neglect and personal tragedy dominate the annals of American public housing. But sometimes, hope and real transformation can still shine through.
As the Plan for Transformation threatened the city’s oldest federal public housing development, the New Deal-era Jane Addams Homes, residents rallied to save one building as a permanent monument to the lives they had built there.
That building is now home to the new National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), which opened this month on Chicago’s West Side.
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“The residents wanted a museum that would call on the power of place and memory to challenge the mainstream narrative about the failure of public housing in the U.S.,” Lisa Yun Lee, the museum’s executive director, tells the Art Newspaper’s Gabriella Angeleti. “It’s now a history museum that meets a world-class art museum, which is what makes it unique.”
Before its brick-and-mortar location opened, the NPHM had been a “museum in the streets” since its incorporation in 2007, Sunny Fischer, the chair of the museum’s board, tells the Chicago Tribune’s Hannah Edgar.
For 18 years, it hosted walking tours and pop-up exhibitions. Now, it finally has the space to permanently display artifacts, like a desk that once sat in Fischer’s childhood home in New York City’s Eastchester Gardens housing project.
In the “Rec Room,” visitors can listen to a large collection of vinyl records made by musicians who once lived in public housing, such as Jimi Hendrix, Barbra Streisand and Elvis Presley. A three-story mural by artist Marisa Morán Jahn decorates the museum’s stairwells with a mix of vibrant colors and black-and-white photographs from Baltimore’s public housing community.
“It shows the happiness and the joy that went on in public housing,” museum guide Gentry Quiñones tells WBEZ’s Esther Yoon-Ji Kang. “There was music, there was community and there was a good time that happened in these spaces.”
As the records attest, public housing has fostered artistic creation. But the museum also celebrates the rich lives of the ordinary residents whose names have never topped a Billboard chart.
The centerpieces of the museum are three recreated apartments from the Addams Homes. One belonged to the family of Marshall Hatch Sr., who toured the replica of his childhood home at the museum’s grand opening.
“Project green!” Hatch exclaimed when he noticed the paint color in the hallway, per the Tribune.
The apartment is adorned with a family set of the World Book Encyclopedia, a pair of boxing gloves from a time when Hatch idolized Muhammad Ali and the velvet couch where he watched the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.
“It’s probably how I ended up in ministry,” said Hatch, now a pastor in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, per the Tribune. “Our father was sitting right there. I looked at him and saw a single tear roll down his cheek.”
For Hatch, returning was a “spiritual, an out-of-body experience; all the memories flooding back,” he tells Block Club Chicago’s Francia Garcia Hernandez.
Ordinary objects—like Fischer’s desk or Hatch’s couch—give life to the rich personal stories that existed beneath national narratives of dilapidation, violence and poverty.
“Even though we’re in public housing, we’re human beings. We want the same things in life that they want,” Francine Washington, a board member of the museum, tells the Associated Press’ Sophia Tareen.
Besides the Hatch apartment, which belonged to a Black family, the other two apartments recreated in the museum belonged to a Jewish family in the 1930s and an Italian family in the 1950s.
“We had to change the narrative about public housing,” Lee tells the AP. “When you said the words ‘Cabrini-Green,’ that brought up a visceral feeling in people. And usually that was one that was a stereotype of what it means to be poor and Black in America. Creating exhibits that challenge that narrative was a really important part of our work.”
In partnership with the CHA, the museum complex also hosts 15 affordable public housing units. Eight current public housing residents are also museum ambassadors, per the Tribune. Admission to the NPHM, a registered Site of Conscience, is free.
“This museum was built by hundreds of dedicated people who have made it a reality,” Fischer says in a statement. “As a Site of Conscience, we join museums around the world committed to telling complicated and difficult stories, preserving history and imagining a more just future.”
