Year in Review: Welcoming Community, Inviting Conversation

The past year has seen exciting growth in our public engagement efforts. Whether it's through our own programming or partnership events, we are always looking to actively engage audiences in our mission. This is the first of three installments of our "Year In Review." 

JANUARY

17 January – Bronzeville Visitor Information Center presents Audrey Petty in conversation with Monroe Anderson and a panel of Chicago residents, scholars, politicians and cultural leaders discussing High Rise Stories including NPHM Interim Director Todd Palmer

23 January – NPHM co-presents Larry Vale (MIT) speaking about Purging the Poorest with “One Book, One Chicago” at the Chicago Public Library

30 January – NPHM in partnership with Newberry Library “Meet the Authors” event Public Housing, Urban Politics, and Reform in Postwar Chicago & Milwaukee with Brad Hunt (Roosevelt University), Eric Fure-Slocum (St. Olaf College) and Leon Fink (UIC)

31 January – Social media coordinator and University of Birmingham UK exchange intern and Rachael Foster presents the NPHM story at the UIC Urban Innovation Symposium Pecha Kucha

MARCH

18 March – “Total Reset” Roundtable at the Institute for Public Architecture New York City, moderated by David Burney in conversation with national public housing experts and advocates including NPHM Board Chair Sunny Fischer

22 March – NPHM’s 1322 Taylor Street building tour for Lake Forest College “American Cities” class    

APRIL        

30 April – We Are A Part of Them: A Community Open House brings 30-plus individuals into a communal discussion with the staff and Board.  The gathering reveals NPHM’s  multifaceted stakeholders include artists from Cabrini-Green, local advisory leaders from Washington Park and ABLA, former CHA employees, high-school aged mixed-income housing residents from Park Boulevard, funders from Chicago Community Trust and Alphawood, scattered site parents from the North Side, housing advocacy journalists, architects, U Chicago PhD candidates and professionals with family heritage and lore in NYCHA.

MAY

5 May – Chicago Community Trust in partnership with IIT’s Institute of Design “Social Sector Service Systems Workshop” exhibition. Features the work of public housing resident and photographer/teacher Annie Stuebenfield’s alongside other community-created and -informed projects created by IIT with NPHM and the Segundo Ruiz Belvez Cultural Center in Humboldt Park.

29 May – “Creating the Inclusive City: We Are A Part of Them 2” brings five practitioners from diverse areas of arts, culture and the humanities into conversation with the audience to imagine what a less-divided urban community might look like. With film producer and Cabrini-Green activist Teddy Bernard and Groundswell Films’ Sam Spitz; U Chicago race and literature professor Adrienne Brown; Chicago Home Theater Festival’s Irina Zadov; Aguilar of the Graffiti Institute, and Youth Struggling for Survival’s Sandra Sosa.  

JUNE

25- 28 June – NPHM hosts “Preserving the Past and Envisioning the Future of Public Housing” as a special program of the American Institute of Architects’ Convention. After an introductory session for the AIA Housing Knowledge Community workshop, NPHM’s Todd Palmer is joined by “mobile symposium” guides Pete Landon (Principal, Landon Bone Baker Architects), Professor Bob Brueggman (UIC) and NPHM Youth Advisory Council alumna Salyndrea Jones to look at lesson learned at 1322 Taylor Street and across Chicago with 30 national architects.

AUGUST

6 August – Greening the Grounds, an event bringing NPHM neighbors to help clean up our future home at 1322 W Taylor Street. The University Village Association, ABLA, Taylor Street Farms, and many NPHM friends came out to enjoy an afternoon of flower bed planting and general grounds clean up. 

8 August – NPHM on CAN-TV “Housing Matters with Recorder of Deeds Karen Yarborough”

SEPTEMBER

19 September – NPHM Interim Director and Curator Todd Palmer participates in IIT’s Institute of Design/Open Society Institute “Future of Work” roundtable                 

30 September – 1 October University of Chicago Graham School 66th Annual Know Your Chicago Tour, “Sweet Home Chicago: Problems and Promises of Public Housing”                                    

NOVEMBER

20 November – Te-Nehesi Coates Conversation in partnership with the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.  

DECEMBER

10 December – Telling Belongings, a community storytelling event bringing the objects of our daily lives to help tell the story of public housing, curated by Interim Executive Director Todd Palmer.

Thanks for a great year!

Daniel Ronan, Coordinator of Site Projects & Public Engagement, NPHM

Telling Belongings: A Moving Night

While Telling Belongings concluded our “We Are A Part of Them” 2014 program series (made possible with a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council), do look for it to be the first of ongoing opportunities that connect the dots in NPHM between “public housing” and “museum.”  That’s to say -- in a one hour mash-up of storytelling and “show-and-tell” we sought to link the (stuffy) stewardship role of *all* museums (collecting and displaying “stuff,” or more politely, “belongings”) to the powerful and innovative mission of *this* museum: telling and remembering diverse first-hand stories of the American public housing experience.

What happened?

Jack Medor  drew our attention to a power of a family heirloom. His belonging: a simple bowl with a patina of chop marks in a delicate pattern that attests to generations making gefilte fish. In his telling we could almost taste the subtle flavorings that the bowl helped bring to life. Jack (who happens to be NPHM Board Treasurer) told the story on behalf of his mother Ines (Turovitz) Medor. He illuminated how cherished his ancestor's brand-new apartment would have been in 1938 as a cradle for keeping age-old spiritual traditions. The Turovitz-Medor family history will figure prominently in the core Museum apartment exhibitions.

Rev. Marshall Hatch, pastor at New Mt. Pilgrim Missionary Baptist, recalled witnessing the Sears Tower going up in the early 70s just before his family left to purchase a home further west, saying: “It gave me a sense of how close it was, yet so far away for me.”  In a Chicago where much of the city remained off-limits to Blacks, Rev. Hatch spoke of an embracing community in the Jane Addams Homes – approaching a kind of utopia.  An ideal place where his family proudly displayed a World Book encyclopedia set (depicted in a photo from his “show and tell” biography). Coupled with the government’s commitment to local schools, in the Hatch family home (and one of our core exhibition "apartments") what was “public” was very good, indeed.

Maria Sopeña delivered a poignant account of her sometimes painful journey from exile in Cuba to being “raised by the streets” of Uptown. Ultimately the struggles of single motherhood brought her in the 90’s to CHA’s North Side scattered sites.  As a resident has consistently raised her voice to transform her community and serves now as a Central Advisory Council resident leader.  She shared a different side of her zeal to make an impact through her shared object.  Her painted Caribbean scene pointed to ethnic origins, but also to the possibility that home can also be a site for dreams and transcendence. Her story is a story of today, reminding us that the museum will be reflecting not just the past, but engaging present-day lives and touching on questions of the future.

Georgina Valverde deftly wove these distinct voices and stories into a moderated conversation and at the end, invited the audience in to share stories of their own. We had three incredible takers. A handcrafted hat revealed a story of friendship (and a place to sleep in a strange town).  A baseball revealed an ordinary day intersecting with world history. And a proudly worn Henry Horner Homes t-shirt and handwritten journal came to evoke the profoundly supportive impact of public housing in one woman’s life.

What did this interdisciplinary artist and (by day) educator at the Art Institute of Chicago make of these varied belongings and the stories about them? Georgina insisted to me afterwards: “they must be told -- so lived experience can become history! They can help heal people, not just those who lived and still live in public housing, but all of us.

by Todd Palmer, Interim Director and Curator, NPHM

A Look Back: NPHM Research Reveals a Progressive Partnership that Built Real Change

For the last seven months I have worked as a research resident for NPHM. One of my most rewarding tasks involved researching the relationship between Jane Addams–namesake of the community the museum commemorates–and Harold Ickes, the federal official most instrumental in bringing public housing to Chicago during the New Deal. Their three-decade association illuminates the history of public housing at the neighborhood-, city-, and national level, reminding us of the rich story the NPHM will tell. 
 
Addams, of course, founded and directed Hull House, which provided education, arts and cultural programming, and social services to the immigrant neighborhoods of the Near West Side. Ickes served as U.S. Interior Secretary and director of the Public Works Administration (PWA), the agency that built the Jane Addams Homes near Hull House in 1938. The name of the new housing project honored the recently deceased Addams, also representing a culmination of a long-standing partnership between Addams and Ickes. 

The pair first met in the early 1900s. Ickes was a young lawyer and former newspaper reporter, in many ways Addams’s polar opposite. Ickes hailed from a modest railroad town in western Pennsylvania and carried a famously sour disposition titling his memoir, Autobiography of a Curmudgeon. In contrast, the very proper Addams grew up in a middle-class Iowa family. Their friendship grew out of a common commitment to social justice and willingness to challenge Chicago’s plight of the poor.   
 
Ickes began providing legal assistance to Hull House. When the Chicago police chief shot to death a young Russian immigrant in 1908, Addams persuaded Ickes to aid the boy’s sister at the inquest. In 1911, Ickes defended Hull House co-founder Ellen Gates Star following her arrest for picketing with striking workers.
 
Ickes eventually left Chicago, but he and his wife, Ann, remained close friends with Addams and financial supporters of Hull House. In their correspondence, Addams and Ickes discussed the political reform campaigns they embraced during the 1900s and 1910s. “Progressivism” advocated more efficient and honest government that would better serve the most vulnerable citizens and solve the country’s most pressing problems, with Ickes representing Addams at the 1914 Progressive Party convention.
 
Many ideas from the progressive movement enjoyed a second life in the 1930s through President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, however Addams and Ickes initially disagreed over Roosevelt. Ickes supported Roosevelt in the election of 1932 and agreed to become his Interior Secretary. Addams voted for the new president’s Republican opponent, Herbert Hoover. Yet, Addams–like Ickes–valued principles above parties. She soon recognized that Roosevelt planned an aggressive response to suffering caused by the Great Depression and became an enthusiastic supporter of the New Deal.
 
When the federal government decided to build low-cost public housing, the task fell to the PWA, which Ickes also helmed, consulting Addams during the site selection process. "I would like to have a slum clearance project as near Hull House as possible” Ickes informed her in 1933, “because that would give the fullest opportunity of cooperation between your institution and the federal government." Addams enthusiastically agreed. "We have tried so long and so ineffectually to have something done in Chicago on housing,” she wrote to Ickes three months before her death. "We always decided that nothing could be done.” 
 
By 1938, something had finally been done about housing in Chicago, although Addams did not live to see it. Many of the people she served at Hull House became the first residents of the Jane Addams Homes, the relationship between Addams and Ickes had coming full circle. What began as a partnership to improve the lives of ordinary people in Chicago’s neighborhoods became a dialogue about the direction of national policies with the efforts of federal action filtering to streets of the Near West Side.

by Richard Anderson, NPHM Research Resident, Princeton University Ph.D. Candidate  

Welcome our new Executive Director!

Dear Friends and Supporters of the National Public Housing Museum:

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Charles Leeks as the NPHM Executive Director.

Charles has a long history in community building and engagement. As a strong advocate of asset-based community development he saw the value of utilizing the powerful stories of communities and the physical environment as ways to foster social justice within communities and to affect policy that helps determine outcomes in those communities. This was particularly true in Chicago ’s North Lawndale community where Charles has been director of the program for Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago (NHS). In addition to the NHS focus on community revitalization through homeownership, Charles also focused on image, physical conditions, and community engagement in the affordable housing arena as a way to change perceptions about such communities. 

During his tenure at NHS in North Lawndale, he participated in projects and partnerships with the University of Illinois at Chicago considering outcomes for Chicago Housing Authority developments, including Ogden Courts, Harrison Courts, and the Lawndale Complex. He developed the Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative, and developed Lawndale exhibits featured at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. His understanding of historic preservation, his ability to create strong community, and his understanding of how to build institutions will serve NPHM well as we move forward to securing our building and creating the permanent museum. 

A resident of public housing in his early childhood, he developed abiding respect for the broad societal benefits offered by an opportunity to provide quality housing to those families that were outside the private market looking in. 

The Museum team is strong. Todd Palmer, who has served as interim director for the past year, has done an exceptional job in this transitional year. He has provided essential direction for programs, site development, and fund development. We are delighted that Todd will be staying on as Associate Director and Curator.   

Those who attended our Telling Belongings event last night were able to meet Charles in person and we look forward to formally introducing him at an event early in 2015. If you have any questions, please call the Museum at (773) 245-1621. 

Thanks for your support and interest in the work and promise of the NPHM. Look for more exciting news about our programs on "The Public Good" in the new year. 

Wishing you the best for the holiday season, 
Sunny Fischer, Chair 
For the NPHM Board of Directors

Telling Belongings Storytelling event on Monday, December 8th - Share your story!

Come join us for "Telling Belongings," the last of our 3-part “We Are A Part of Them” program series.

Jane Addams' Hull House Museum, 800 S. Halsted St.
5:30 pm – 7:30 pm Monday, December 8th

Join the National Public Housing Museum as it connects our personal belongings to first-hand stories of the American public housing experience.

RSVP by emailing dronan@nphm.org or by calling 773.257.7241

Come meet neighbors whose stories will become part of the NPHM through oral history and community co-curation projects. These projects will form the “Four Apartments: Walls that Speak,” our central exhibit for the Museum's home at 1322 Taylor Street.

Our storytelling conversation will be moderated by Georgina Valverde, an interdisciplinary artist and educator who serves as Assistant Director of Teacher Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her concern for generating creative opportunities for everyone is especially pertinent to our "open-source" ambitions for the evening. 

Our Stories: 
The Reverend Marshall Hatch, is the Pastor of West Garfield’s New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. His stories recall life in the Jane Addams Homes from 1962 – 1974, a time that African-American families’ housing options were limited by legal discrimination such as red-lining.

Ines Medor will be joined by her son, Jack Medor, NPHM’s Board Treasurer. She remembers how Jane Addams Homes was embraced by immigrant families like hers that moved in when it opened in 1938. The daughter of Jewish Holocaust refugees from Poland and Russia, her stories recall the intricate connections between public housing, the “Hull House” neighborhood and Little Italy.

Maria Sopeña grew up Cuban-American in Uptown and now lives in “scattered site” housing just a few blocks from the Mayor’s home. She’s a public housing resident advocate as the Local Advisory President representing the Northeast Scattered Sites community, and her son and nephew are part of NPHM’s Youth Advisory Council which will pilot a community co-curation intiative in 2015.

Your Stories:
Would you like to participate in Telling Belongings? After our panelist discussion, we'll open up the circle to your stories: open-mike/show-and-tell style. 

Telling your belongings story? Some things to know:

• Bring a belonging with you: that is, an object or photo you’d like to share a story about.
• What do we mean by belongings? - Really, they can be just about anything. Something that lives with pride of place on your apartment walls. Or something buried in a closet or drawer. Belongings evoke a time of your life, places you miss, things you aspire to.
• Presenters are chosen at random. There is a chance that you won’t get chosen.
• If you're asked to speak, explain what you've brought, even if it is obvious. Tell why it is important to you and why people should care.
• You have five minutes to talk. You can talk for less than than five minutes. In fact, we encourage less than five minutes!
• If you do bring something to share, our staff will photographyour belonging to become part of our virtual collection. And we'll follow-up with other opportunities for you to share your story.

Won't you come join us? RSVP by emailing dronan@nphm.org or by calling 773.257.7241

Instructions adapted from That Belongs in a Museum.

Giving Thanks and Looking Ahead

Hello and Happy Thanksgiving! We have much to be thankful for this year, including our fruitful museum partnerships, our wonderful interns and volunteers, and of course, YOU.

I thank you personally for your involvement, your generous donations, and your engagement in our efforts to be a civic commons, from "We Are A Part of Them" conversations to our site beautification day "Greening the Grounds."

This month, the National Public Housing Museum is both grateful and proud to make an announcement about our role in a big event being produced by Chicago in October, November and December 2015 – about eleven months from now.

NPHM is a Program Partner of The State of the Art of Architecture -- the first-ever Chicago Architecture Biennial, created by the City of Chicago, led by Ty Tabing and with co-artistic direction from Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda. This event will be the largest international survey of contemporary architecture in North America.

For CAB 2015 NPHM is working in collaboration with The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University  in NYC to bring their exhibition House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate to the US for the first time.

House Housing premiered in June 2014 in an Italian residential apartment as part of the Venice International Architecture Exhibition.  It chronicles the curious intersection of economics, politics and architecture that connect public housing to private real estate markets in a series of episodes. These stories range from lesser known Congressional experiments in wartime housing from 1918 to the recent foreclosure crisis.

Of course it’s probably a bit too soon to announce to ask you to mark calendars with a save the date…but for the staff and partners working behind the scenes, the next eleven months will progress like a blink of an eye.

As that developmental work transpires, we’ll be sharing with you how this Chicago-meets-NYC-and-Venice exhibition partnership segues with the work we’re doing towards construction at 1322 Taylor Street, where we’re advancing plans to open residents’ experiences of dwelling in the Jane Addams Homes to the public.

Alongside that core curatorial work, House Housing serves as a provocative reminder that the memories we’re collecting speak to contemporary design issues. And together the Buell Center and NPHM’s jointly mounted exhibit and related programming will ask tough questions about the economic, social and political contexts that will determine how we build housing accessibly, sustainably and affordably in the future.

Todd Palmer, Interim Executive Director and Curator of the NPHM

Our Work Outside: NPHM's Camille Acker on Chicago Artist's Month

"Our Work Outside" is an occasional series for NPHM staff to share a little bit of what they do outside of their immediate duties which informs the Museum's work.

October is that time right before Chicagoans retreat to their homes and ready themselves for winter. The weather, still filled with the lingering warmth of summer, can encourage exploration, but often that exploration takes us only as far as our familiarity, the sides of town and neighborhoods we know.
 
But every October, the city of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events presents Chicago Artists Month, a chance for creatives across the city to share their work with the public. Over the course of five weeks and with more than 300 events, people across the city can discover new neighborhoods, new forms or art, and new artists doing work in their city. This year's theme, Crossing Borders, allowed artists to imagine ways audiences might seek out more of what Chicago has to offer.
           
As a part of my work with a diverse group of Chicago writers called VONA Chicago, we looked for ways to defy the borders that others have made for us and we make for ourselves.
 
On October 5th, people came out to Humboldt Park for a Sunday afternoon of readings of multi-genre writing and listening to multi-genre music while they mapped their Chicago. Where we live and work are only part of what makes up our Chicago. Our city is also our favorite beach, our favorite bookstore, and the place that has the sandwich we love. For some, there is real danger in crossing a border--a block that is unwelcoming or a neighborhood that is struggling--and for others it's only the fear of the unknown that stops them.
 
But if we can find ways to move past our borders, we begin to find all kinds of places where we can actually meet. Those intersections are vital to building community, so that in the Little Italy neighborhood of the Jane Addams Homes, the border between an Italian neighborhood, a university, and a public housing resident community can blur beyond recognition.

by Camille Acker, Programs and Development Associate of the NPHM

NPHM Partners with the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics to Sponsor Coates Event

Ta-Nehisi Coates event at the University of Chicago. Photo: Daniel Ronan

On Thursday, November 20th, NPHM was pleased to be one of the partners with the Center of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics Ta-Nehisi Coates event. Coates is a senior writer for The Atlantic and author of the much-discussed article, "The Case for Reparations." The June cover story helped fuel higher than average magazine sales and resulted in increased online traffic to read an examination of the historical inequalities that still shape what African-Americans face today.

At the heart of the article's argument was housing policy in Chicago. In the 1960s and 1970s, an organization called the Contract Buyers League fought back against discriminatory housing policies that denied African-Americans the possibility of real home ownership. Instead, these residents of North Lawndale bought their house "on time," gaining no equity in their homes and under constant threat of losing their houses if they missed even one payment.

A video presentation at the beginning of the talk allowed even those audience members who hadn't yet read "The Case for Reparations" to learn what the Contract Buyers League and central figure of the organization, Clyde Ross, endured to be able to call themselves homeowners.

In conversation with the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, James Bennet, Coates explained his thinking behind the article and how the sociological research so prevalent in Chicago made it a perfect case study. The talk was rich with information from Coates's extensively researched article, but also revealed the very human side of the story, both the real emotional toll that injustice takes and the difficult, if necessary, need to do what is possible to make change.

Coates also took questions from the audience ranging from the argument to be made for reparations for Native Americans to recommendations for African-American high school students applying to college. Coates acknowledged that reparations as an actual policy would be near impossible for this country to enact, but the event evidenced that if nothing else, Coates has started quite a conversation.

National Engagement for a "National" Museum

Above: The NPHM banner at MacArthur Foundation's "How Housing Matters" convening in D.C.; NPHM staff with board member Francine Washington tabling at the NAHRO coference in Baltimore.; NPHM Staff with former head of CPS, Jean-Claude Brizard.

How does our “little museum that could,” still work hard to close a contract on our designated historic property, make good on the promise of our name, and deliver a museum of “national” stature?

Over the last few weeks, the staff, Board and I have been traveling between Chicago and the nation’s capital region with a collective mindset to meet the ever-present challenge of our name. That is to say, to think through how we deliver a story that is national in scope without losing the grassroots character that created the NPHM.

Two weeks ago, we attended the “How Housing Matters” conference convened by the MacArthur Foundation and the National Building Museum. In addition, we participated in national housing conversations in Baltimore, hosted by Board Member (and NAHRO Chair) Preston Prince.

Thanks to the generosity of Nixon Peabody and the Preservation Action Foundation in Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to meet recently sworn-in HUD Secretary Julian Castro on October .  His speech before a small group of folks at the intersection of preservation and housing brought home one way how our work to preserve public housing heritage in Chicago speaks to a national conversation about the “public good”.  He visioned a robust and holistic civic sector that might meet the growing demand for affordable housing while also protecting the heritage of the built environment for future generations.

One week later, NPHM staff and programs vice-chair Roberta Feldman were invited by our colleagues at the National Building Museum and friends at the MacArthur Foundation back to Washington for the “How Housing Matters” conference, on our way to join Board members Francine Washington, Saul Himelstein and Preston Prince at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials conference in Baltimore.

At both convenings we saw clear evidence from practitioners, policymakers and researchers demonstrating that public investments in housing can leverage dramatic impacts across a range of civic concerns from education to employment.  

Against this optimistic future, the current lack of commitment from lawmakers to public investment was a common cautionary refrain.  We were encouraged by the many conversations we had about how our museum can create a national network that build bridges between housing experts and the general public through the tools of storytelling unique to museum of arts, culture and creativity. 

The need is plain (10,000 units of housing a year are lost to disrepair which removes shelter for families and creates gaps in our community fabric).  We believe it possible to convey the scale of this need through stories that get at a shared heritage and common future to the folks who weren’t at those convenings.

So we came back with more allies who get why we work to open the doors of a fragment of the  “real Chicago” to the general public.  We were excited to discover a shared vision of what might happen at a site of conscience when visitors to Chicago --a national capital of cultural tourism--  go home and become part of the transformation of their own communities.  As we convened at the nation’s “center” we heard stories from scattered sites, Native communities and veterans homes from coast to coast. We imagined the urgency and humanity of what people discover at a National Public Housing Museum having a significant impact by including more folks in the conversations taking place in city councils, block clubs and Congressional offices nationwide.

by Todd Palmer, Interim Executive Director and Curator of the NPHM

Youth Advisory Council Detroit Trip: Exploring Creativity and Careers

Above: The students and chaperones on the 2014 Detroit Trip.; Trip participant Toni Dixon takes a wildflower back from Michigan Central Station.

The Youth Advisory Council, our eleven intrepid students from 15-21, takes an annual trip to visit colleges and discover the history of a place they may never have been before. This year: Detroit and the youth came ready to experience all the city had to offer: art, culture, education, and just a little bit of bowling.

Todd Palmer, NPHM’s Interim Director, Daniel Ronan, the Sites Project and Outreach Coordinator, Maria Sopena, a resident leader and the mother of one of the YACers, and I, the Programs and Development Associate, went along for the ride. This trip was also a major planning project for our summer interns, Salyndrea Jones and Savannah Wright.
 
Our train to Detroit arrived late, but yielded more time to complain about homework, sample the latest video games, and discover that a card game like War might take the entire trip to finally declare a winner, the YAC’s own Shakira Johnson. We were ready for sleep when it came and hoping to be ready for all we would see that weekend.
 
Our Saturday morning started with a colorful bus waiting to take us around what was a new city for most of the YAC. The Detroit Bus Company, a small business dedicated to reusing former school buses, exemplified what we hoped for the trip: what had been and what could be.

What will be for many of the YAC next year is college, and our first stop that morning was the College for Creative Studies where a few of our YACers, Ture Champion, Destin Sopena, and Adam Vscheransky saw ways that their natural curiosity and creativity might one day be a career path.
 
It was a day of creative study. First, an unplanned detour to the Heidelberg Project, blocks of outdoor art on Detroit’s east side created by artist Tyree Guyton in 1986, where some of the youth lingered over the art and some found the use of abandoned stuffed animals and shoes as part of the art as sad, but all signed their names to the house that visitors sign.

Later, the youth would visit Detroit Institute of Art and get their minds around what exactly Diego Rivera had been up to with his WPA mural and a tour of the Motown Museum, where lots of YACers remembered this song and that song because their mothers and grandmothers had played them so often. We ended the day with food and walking and more walking. Too much walking, they all said, and the day was finally done.
 
Our Sunday was as a Sunday should be, leisurely. We had breakfast and got on our bus to see some of Detroit’s Wayne State. But, there were more important site for the YACers to see they said: like Eminem’s 8 Mile. “They do know it’s just a street?” our bus driver asked. They did and they did take pictures.

There was lunch and vintage shopping at Detroit’s historic Eastern Market and at the very end of the day, there was bowling. But, that last day, though Detroit’s abandoned buildings weren’t the focus of our time there, destruction could also lead to creativity and so we saw old abandoned plants, houses half torn down, and Detroit’s beautiful and abandoned Michigan Central Station.
 
Toni Dixon, one of the YAC’s seniors, wanted to remember more than just the abandoned buildings and picked up a flower growing just outside of the chain link fence surrounding the train station. She mentioned the need to take a bit of the beauty back home with her to remember Detroit. As we all did.

by Camille Acker, the Programs and Development Associate of the NPHM
 

Helping Tell the Story: The NPHM Research Team

NPHM Staff, Interns, and Researchers in Residents in September 2013. From top to bottom, left to right: Daniel Ronan, Salyndrea Jones, Rich Anderson, Camille Acker, Robin Bartram, Todd Palmer, Savannah White, & Ayelet Pinnolis.

“We were poor. Absolutely poor. But we were happy,” says Ines Medor, mother of NPHM Board Member Jack Medor and core exhibition oral history participant on her experience living in the Jane Addams Homes.

She, her brother, and her parents were among the first residents who moved into the new buildings in 1938. We were able to lift these perspectives and many other nuggets of wisdom, raw observation and sometimes paradoxical reflections out of the raw material (audio and transcriptions) collected in 2011 thanks to a talented crew of researchers that joined NPHM this summer and bade their farewells in mid-September. 

The narratives and photographic resources they uncovered debuted in partnership with the University of Chicago Graham Foundation’s annual “Know Your Chicago” tours.  To illustrate Alexander Polikoff’s keynote address at the KYC kickoff symposium, NPHM’s team unearthed images this legal celebrity might use to illustrate the political and cultural arc of the Businesspeople for the Public Interest’s landmark case, Gautreaux vs. Chicago Housing Authority and HUD. This instrumental case toppled segregation in public housing and forever changed the tenor of public housing policy discussions.

Illustrative stories from three diverse families living in public housing at our own heritage site  peppered my own remarks at the KYC tour luncheon down the street from the Jane Addams building.  With our Board Chair Sunny Fischer, CHA advocate and Board Member Crystal Palmer and poverty scholar Paul Fischer, NPHM shared our story as part of the fabric of public housing in the city with 220 Chicagoland residents, many of them women. Issues of poverty, racism and cultural disconnection came alive as these newcomers to the questions visited our site as well as Lathrop and Legends on a two-day bus tour.

Programs, exhibits, talks and images capture the stories of public housing, but our stories aren’t possible without the efforts of staff, interns and volunteers that happens every day unseen at our upstart museum’s offices on Kingsbury Street. I’d like to make sure you know how valuable this work is. 

On September 18 we bade farewell to University of Chicago’s undergraduate program second-year Ayelet Pinnolis from Boston.  You’ll be hearing a lot more about letters she delved into the UIC archives to unearth that reveal the depth of connection between our namesake site, America’s “most dangerous women” Jane Addams and her progressive friend in Washington Sec. Harold Ickes.

Richard Anderson brings perspective on the intersection of the Hull House neighborhood and Chicago’s infamous history of machine politics, the focus of his dissertation at Princeton University. We’re delighted he’ll be with us through the beginning of 2015.

Robin Bartram returned to NPHM (after facilitating staff curatorial discussions last summer) through September as well. She’s a student of our advisor Mary Patillo, and has completed insightful comparative work on representations of domesticity and dwelling at cultural sites like the Tenement Museum as a Northwestern PhD candidate.

Together Ayelet, Richard and Robin worked to make our archives of oral history, photographic and secondary sources more accessible. The unglamorous work of sorting, filing and indexing led to the more exciting possibilities of uncovering stories, laying the groundwork for us to expose latent themes in more detail this winter and next spring.

We now also return to our oral history subjects (the Medor family along with the Rizzis and Hatches), bringing in scholarly partners to frame our work in context, and most importantly engaging current public housing residents (especially youth) in ensuring that the stories of 1322 Taylor Street connect all the way south to Altgeld, around the corner to Cabrini and from Coast to Coast.

by Todd Palmer, Interim Executive Director and Curator at the NPHM

NPHM at Festa Italiana

The National Public Housing Museum was delighted to have been invited by host organization University Village Association (of which NPHM is now a member) to participate in the annual Festa Italiana along Taylor Street this past Thursday - Sunday August 14-17. 

With a booth located directly in front of our future museum home, it was a great opportunity to share our story and progress with neighbors and passers-by.  We were most delighted by the many visitors who had their own stories to tell.  

We were reminded of how preserving this authentic place can inspire community conversations. One woman from Little Italy excitedly exclaimed: "I was born here!"  We met a young man from ABLA with a smartphone "archive" of pictures of families in the 1990s. A family of Mexican-American descent paused to photograph themselves in front of our banner and buildings. Even though they didn't live at 1322 Taylor, they took evident pride in this place just a few buildings away from their own, as they shared stories of a diverse community living here in the 1950s with their daughters. 

And in a series of snapshots, ensured that their piece of history would be celebrated for generations to come. 

Housing Matters Episode 4: with Karen Yarbrough

Thanks For Supporting Greening The Grounds

The National Public Housing Museum would like to thank everyone who came out to support Greening the Grounds, which was and amazing outcome. We appreciate everyone’s   contribution of time and energy, this shows us working as a people to make things better in our neighborhoods and communities. Special thanks to ABLA, the University Village Association, and the Taylor Street Farms for helping put this event together. We would also like to invite you all to Festa this week http://starevents.com/festivals/festa-italiana/ Come out and get to know the neighborhood with the NPHM.  

Greening the Grounds

Greening the Grounds

Wednesday, August 6th – A Gathering of Neighbors

Time – 4:30 pm to 6:30 pm

Location – the future National Public Housing Museum, 1322 W. Taylor St.

Come join staff and supporters on the site of the future National Public Housing Museum as we spruce up the grounds for the Festa Italiana street fair! Be sure to RSVP below!

Want to help us more? Can't make it? We need plants, potting soil, two large planter pots, as well as garden tools and gloves for the event. You can also help water our plants!

Can you help us in any of these ways? Please let Daniel know by email, or give him a call at (773) 257-7241(773) 257-7241

Still want to show your support? Donate to help us put on this event.

By working together, we can all make the neighborhood look even more beautiful!