AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
One of America's first examples of public housing are the Jane Adams Homes in Chicago, built in 1938 and named for the trailblazing reformer. Fast forward to now, and there are some 1 million public housing units in the U.S., and the Adams Homes are getting a second act as a museum dedicated to telling the story of public housing. From Chicago, Alison Cuddy reports.
ALISON CUDDY: Public housing has taken many forms, from high rises to single-family homes. The National Public Housing Museum is housed in a three-story red brick building in the heart of Chicago's historic Little Italy neighborhood. Inside and out, everything looks brand new. The curvy art deco metal balconies are freshly painted. Large, multi-paned windows flood the interior with light.
There are exhibitions, a recording studio, art installations, even a small room where visitors can spin records made by people who lived in public housing. On the second floor, executive director Lisa Yun Lee leads a group through a trio of apartments furnished in historic period detail from the 1930s to the 1970s.
LISA YUN LEE: Feel free to take a seat.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Nobody wants to sit on the furniture.
(LAUGHTER)
LEE: You can totally sit on the furniture.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I'll sit on the furniture.
LEE: Sit on the furniture.
CUDDY: In the small living room, a green striped couch sits next to an end table covered with framed family photos and a page from a war ration book. The kitchen floor has checkerboard linoleum. These details, plus oral histories, evoke the presence of the real people who lived here across the decades, like a Jewish family, one of the earliest residents.
LEE: So this was Inez Turovitz (ph) She was such a lovely character.
CUDDY: From a vintage Cathedral-style radio, the recorded voice of Inez's niece, Tina Turowitz Bernbaum (ph), recalls her family's story.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TINA TUROVITZ BERNBAUM: My bubbe, Molly, and zayde (ph) settled on the south side of Chicago. But when the Great Depression hit, they, like many other people, needed an affordable place to live, and they heard about the Jane Adams homes.
CUDDY: In the 1930s, public housing held promise for many. Returning veterans, immigrants and others found community there. Many still do. In the history lessons exhibition, Education Ambassador Gentry Quinones points to objects donated by former and current public housing residents, including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who lived in public housing as a child.
GENTRY QUINONES: She told her story of living in the projects in New York City and she was gracious enough to share some pictures with us.
CUDDY: By the 1960s and '70s, public housing came to be seen in a negative light, as places where poverty, crime and segregation were concentrated and persisted. Disinvestment left the buildings in disrepair. Lee says the museum wants to change the narrative about public housing then and now without exploiting images or stories of suffering, which she calls poverty porn.
LEE: How do you tell traumatic stories so that you don't retraumatize people? How do you tell these tragic stories so that people listen with empathy?
CUDDY: For Lee and her staff, the answer is simple - start with the experiences of residents. Their stories are woven throughout the museum, including their role in its origins. In the late '90s, as Chicago began to tear down its public housing, demolishing around 25,000 units, some public housing residents waged a long and hard-won fight to save this building, hoping it could be a place to tell their story.
It took decades before their idea for a museum was approved. Abandoned since 2002, a lot of work was required to bring this building back to life. Francine Washington is on the board of the museum. She says the museum does reflect her experiences as a public housing resident. She hopes it challenges stereotypes.
FRANCINE WASHINGTON: I love this place. This is a place called home. People get to see our plight, to see that we had the same blood type, that we want the same thing in our life that they want.
CUDDY: The need for affordable housing remains. The waiting list for public housing in Chicago is over 100,000 people. It can take years or even decades to get in. The museum wants to intervene in that reality. It offers paid workforce development programs for public housing residents. Some may even live there in one of 15 mixed-income housing units in a wing of the building separate from the museum. Lee says, all of it is critical to the museum's mission to advocate for housing as a human right.
LEE: We believe that in order to preserve history, you have to make it relevant to the most critical social justice issues of today and that there is no way that we can actually address any of the social issues that we want to unless we go back in time and ask, what have we not yet learned from history?
CUDDY: That's a question that Lee and others hope the National Public Housing Museum will help people answer. For NPR News, I'm Alison Cuddy in Chicago. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.