Ruth Abram, the co-founder of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City and founder of The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (of which NPHM is a proud member), has been a champion of the Museum from the beginning. Ruth served as one of our earliest advisors and we’re fortunate to have her in our corner. “Ruth has transformed and advanced the fields of public history and preservation, by insisting that we tell more inclusive, accessible, and diverse stories that are relevant to social justice and struggles today,” said Dr. Lisa Yun Lee, NPHM executive director.
Ruth first learned about the NPHM from Sunny Fischer, the Museum co-founder and board president but in a way, her connection to Chicago and the Museum predates that original meeting. As a young woman growing up in the South, Abram came across the autobiography of Jane Addams. “Transfixed by the heroic story of this woman from a background much like mine, I reached up my hand to Jane Addams and let her lift me to a wider world. Such is the power of history, that it can offer role models that may not be otherwise available,” Ruth said in her acceptance speech at the 2019 Louise du Pont Crowninshield Award, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s highest honor.
The story of the Tenement Museum is fascinating and offers many lessons for the NPHM. Ruth had an idea for a museum in 1984 that would tell the story of the city's immigrant past. In 1988, her colleague Anita Jacobson discovered the building that is now the museum site on Orchard Street. The building had been untouched for 50 years. They were able to lease it until they were able buy it for close to a million. Then they had to raise twice the amount to turn it into a museum. It was a slow process, and they began giving tours almost immediately, before many of the exhibitions and permanent installations where complete. They spent five years on research in order to tell the stories with proper context.
“I will tell you one thing,” Ruth said in a telephone interview, “poverty on the part of the museum actually offered us time to get things right and to experiment with ideas.” When something wasn’t working, they could discard it and start over. “You will find that too,” she said. “We did one apartment at a time and the first one we got the wallpaper wrong and we learned from that. Our understanding of the political and social forces at play at the time on the apartments that we were working on became clearer and clearer, so I don’t regret the time that it took.”
Ruth said that it was moving to see visitors understand history by experiencing the exhibitions and installations, and it will be important for people to see what public housing was like before it became associated with poverty and crime. “It was a great tribute to progressivism and democracy and it attracted the great architects who wanted to participate in this wonderful idea,” she said. Through oral histories, people can learn what public housing was like in the 1930s, for instance, where everyone took turns caring for the public spaces and to learn that they had loved living there. “So often the word poor has so many associations,” said Ruth, who was surprised to learn that tenants were all working people and included law students, nursing students, teachers. “It sounded like a very vibrant place even as it was allowed to deteriorate – not by tenants.”
Ruth has always identified herself as an activist as well as a social historian. “As soon as you are talking about a social issue, and certainly affordable housing is one of those issues, you ought to be helping people see the relationship of the history to the present day. At the housing museum, they [visitors] come to meet, in so many words, the families that got to live there with such pride and it ought to raise all sorts of questions about public housing today and affordable housing today.”
For 20 years, Ruth led the Tenement Museum and when she stepped down as president and retired to upstate New York, she quickly embarked on another visionary project – Behold! New Lebanon – a museum of rural life intended to help revitalize the area and support agritourism. As that program continues to grow, she has taken on yet another project – researching the Promised Land Plantation located in Gwinnett, Georgia to help interpret the site. It was owned by her maternal great-great-great grandfather, a slave owner named Thomas Maguire, and it went from being a slave-worked plantation to a place where descendants of those slaves could buy their own land and create a community. It was owned by an African American family, the Livseys, who bought the plantation house in 1920 and lived there until recently.