“Everyone deserves a place to call home.” This is the simple, yet somehow unattributed, quote on the website of the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago.
Inside the museum, the ordinary becomes extraordinary as the stories of public housing residents are given their rightful place at the forefront of the conversation. Activists and community members collaborate with curators and historians to create exhibits that honor the past while acknowledging the struggles of the present.
The museum features preserved apartments, everyday objects, political art, an illuminated public housing case study, and more, all building up the beautiful stories and heartbreaking injustices of the residents of Chicago.
History
The National Public Housing Museum rests on the site of the historic Jane Addams Homes. Built following the 1937 Housing Act, the Homes were Chicago’s first public housing complexes.
Capturing the social justice narrative of the Homes, they were named after the famous activist Jane Addams, who co-founded the most extensive settlement houses in the United States, which provided housing and social services to poor and immigrant families.
At the beginning of their creation, the Jane Addams Homes housed mostly poor white families, as shown in an exhibit which restores the apartment of the Turovitz household–a Jewish family that moved in 1938. There you can take a virtual tour as the recorded voice of Inez Turovitz describes her kosher kitchen and childhood memories.
In an adjacent room, styled right out of the 1950s, a video projection by Manual Cinema tells the story of how redlining and other racist housing policies led to a segregated Chicago. Denied housing loads or access to “desirable neighborhoods,” African Americans coming to Chicago were forced to live in underfunded residential areas, which still haunts its landscape of the city today.
In the 1990s, the Chicago government accelerated their tirade against public housing, tearing down over 25,000 units. In 2007, a diverse group of organizers, historians, activists, cultural experts and community leaders fought to preserve the Jane Addams Homes. They turned the buildings into a museum where the stories and voices of public housing history could be heard.
Public Housing Stories
While there have been great inroads in telling the story of famous African Americans such as Fredrick Douglas, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the history daily common person is still dominated by the perspective of the white man. The Public Housing Museum aims to build on that narrative with its ‘History Lessons: Everyday Objects from Public Housing’ exhibition.
In this exhibit, residents of public housing have donated simple yet memorable household objects and written place cards–featuring stories, memories, and poems–that transport you into their lives. A raggedy dog collar sits glorified on a pedestal where a heartwarming caption describes how the dog saved a resident’s life from a gas leak.
Jurist Sonia Sotomayer donated a picture of her graduation in the Bronxdale Houses, where she would escape the troubling parts of her childhood by transporting herself through the pages of the books in the local library. “It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood, and it remains a way, through the power of words, to change the world,” wrote Sotomayer in the placard under her photo.
On the side of the wall hangs a record of the song, “Keep on Loving You” presented to LaTonya Floyd in memory of her late brother George Floyd, whose murder by a white police officer became the catalyst for 2020 protests denouncing police brutality.
Written by LaTonya Floyd, the placard recounts her brother’s love for Reo Speedwagon’s song. The domestic scene makes his death ever more heartbreaking. “We sang it almost every day, and we sang it a week before he got killed,” she writes.
Case Study
In a room adjacent to the everyday objects of public housing is a room dedicated to a specific case study of the Millers River Apartments. It highlights the peculiar paradoxes of public housing in Cambridge Massachusetts.
Due to decreasing financial assistance, which was a result of oppressive federal and state regulations, the Cambridge Housing Authority (CHA) had to cede control to private partners such as Wells Fargo and Citibank. Through complicated legal maneuvers, the CHA was able to maintain the Millers Rivers Apartments as affordable housing.
While privatization is often antithetical to goals of increased welfare and equality, this case study proves how partnering with private actors can allow public agencies to keep housing affordable with adequate infrastructure. The exhibit is a testament to how analyzing the past can uncover strategies that can be applied in the present.
Activism
History is more than the study of the past–it is a tool to re-evaluate our present and build a better future. Yet, most museums omit that vital half of the narrative, lacking the outreach that would connect their exhibitions to the community.
The National Public Housing Museum bridges that gap with its Empowerment Hub and Cultural Workforce Development Program that “addresses systemic and structural barriers to education, training, and entrepreneurship.”
On the side of the wall in the Hub hang two bold, eye-catching posters by Drawnversation. One urges the viewer to “demand the impossible.” The words are framed by historical revolutionary organizers Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, James Baldwin and, of course, Jane Addams.
The other poster dives into the specifics, arguing that while abolishing the prison system, the return of indigenous land, and free housing may seem impossible, so did great successes such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and public housing. What we need to do is keep fighting. The bottom of the poster invites the viewer to use the Empowerment Hub for that purpose.
On the center table is an exhibit of Elizabeth Magie’s The Landlord’s Game, a board game patented in 1904 designed to protest monopolies and big businesses. Magie designed two games, one where everyone playing was rewarded when wealth was gained and another where the goal was to accumulate wealth at the expense of others.
While the point of the game was to teach people that disrupting wealth equality benefited everyone, the latter version of the game grew to immense fame as the basis for the popular board game Monopoly. Despite its tragic irony, Magie’s The Landlord’s Game provides an example of creative resistance against capitalism using art and education–a principle emulated in the work done in the Empowerment Hub.
The Hub is a space for engaging in education, entrepreneurship, and workforce training. There is a heavy emphasis on cultivating oral history as a social and civic tool, used to share the stories of public housing residents and plan for future civil change.
The museum store is an additional way that bridges the connection between the past and the present. The Corner Store Co-op features posters, art, shirts, bags, and more from small businesses and cooperatives, all owned by public housing residents.
As written on the museum’s website, “The physical and online stores also function as informal sites of activation for visitors and community members to learn and share the important history and present-day advocacy of cooperatives, including how public housing residents contribute to, and benefit from, a solidarity economy ecosystem.” Combining history and present business, the Corner Store Co-op strives to set an example for how businesses and cooperatives can promote economic equity.
By working directly with public housing residents, the National Public Housing Museum helps to give a voice to those who federal and state governments have historically silenced. The thousands of stories of ordinary people–the ones that truly represent the larger part of the population–are given their worthy place in the spotlight.
On the counter of the Corner Store Co-op are buttons that read “abolish rent” and “public housing is a human right,” allowing people to take the message of housing justice out the door with them.
“Everyone deserves a place to call home.”