On a gray Thursday on Chicago’s Near West Side, Rev. Marshall Hatch Sr. stepped through time.
Here were his five sisters, proudly donning caps and gowns in graduation portraits framed on the wall. There, the family’s World Book Encyclopedia set — a favorite of his mother, Helen Holmes Jackson. A petite pair of boxing gloves, a relic from when he was obsessed with Muhammad Ali, and the plush velvet couch that doubled as his bed. Across it: the television on which he watched Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.
“It’s probably how I ended up in ministry,” Hatch Sr., a pastor in West Garfield Park, tells his son, Marshall Hatch Jr., who’s filming the walkthrough on his phone. He points at a spot on the couch. “Our father was sitting right there. I looked at him and saw a single tear roll down his cheek.”
The Hatches are standing in the last surviving building of the former Jane Addams Homes, in an apartment unit eerily like the one Hatch Sr. and his family lived in until he turned 16. It’s not quite the same layout — their unit was down a level and across the hall, meaning this recreation is a mirror image of their actual unit. And there’s no way the Hatches, with their matriarch’s suspicion of television generally, would have gotten a color TV. (“Cellophane paper was blue at the top, green on the bottom, and orange in the middle. You put that on, and that was our first color television,” he jokes.) But all else is uncannily accurate, down to the minty shade of green in the hallway.
“Project green!” Hatch declares when he sees it. “Either that, or peach.”
The Hatches’ time machine comes courtesy of the National Public Housing Museum, the only museum of its kind in the country. The museum opened its first brick-and-mortar space last week after years of being “a museum in the streets,” in the words of board chair Sunny Fischer. Between now and the museum’s incorporation in 2007, Fischer — a former executive of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and a child of a Bronx public housing project herself — says the museum hosted education programs, walking tours and pop-up exhibitions “wherever they would let us,” including an early installation at the Merchandise Mart.
The museum’s new space offers a permanent home for its roving presentations — now free of charge to visitors — which trace the history of public housing from its origins in the New Deal to the present day. But unlike the typical museum, the National Public Housing Museum offers a deeper, more personal engagement through $25 tours of its recreated apartment spaces. The Hatch family apartment is one of two recreated units in the new museum, with the other, representing the Jewish Turovitz family, who were among the Addams Homes’ earliest tenants in the 1930s. A third unit has been transformed into a presentation on redlining, with visuals by local shadow-puppet theater Manual Cinema and a script by Princeton University scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
The National Public Housing Museum was profoundly inspired by New York City’s Tenement Museum, a cluster of well-preserved and partially recreated tenement apartments on the city’s Lower East Side. That museum, which National Public Housing Museum Executive Director Lisa Yun Lee considers a “sister” institution, also incorporates oral histories from tenement residents and their descendants.
But the interactivity of the Chicago experience is largely without precedent. Tour-goers are invited to sample Jackson’s peanut brittle recipe, held in a cookie tin in the Hatch family kitchen. And visitors who tour the Turovitz unit next week will notice an empty space above the sink: the family’s gefilte fish bowl, on display there most of the year, will have been pulled off the shelf for their present-day Passover celebrations. Elsewhere, visitors can spin vinyl records and learn more about the public housing pasts of famous musicians in a “rec room” curated by DJ Spinderella, of Salt-N-Pepa fame, or listen to archival interviews in a studio named for late Chicago historian Dr. Timuel Black Jr.
At every turn, the National Public Housing Museum wants to dispel, or at least complicate, voyeuristic, “Candyman”-inspired notions of what public housing is. Public housing could be the fantastical, Edgar Miller-designed sculpture garden at the Addams Homes’ heart. It could be the hardworking, wisecracking Evans family in the 1970s sitcom “Good Times,” set in Cabrini-Green. It could be the varied lives and hobbies of Baltimore public housing residents, pictured in an ecstatic mural by Marisa Morán Jahn in the museum stairwell.
To that end, eight current public housing residents have joined the staff as museum “ambassadors,” leading education programs and guiding guests through exhibitions. And textile artist Dorothy Burge, whose family lived in LeClaire Courts and the Washington Park Homes, was commissioned to create a quilt portrait of late housing commissioner and museum co-founder Deverra Beverly, which now greets passersby on Taylor Street. Burge remembers rushing to finish her homework early so she could participate in after-school art programs in the Courts.
“In public housing, we always did a lot of collective art. There was quilting, there was collage work,” Burge says.
That the museum building at Ada and Taylor survives, much less hosts the National Public Housing Museum, is a testament to Beverly’s efforts. She and other public housing residents stridently opposed the Chicago Housing Authority’s 1999 Plan of Transformation, which responded to the disrepair of its public housing projects by razing them. According to the museum, the plan precipitated the largest net loss of affordable housing in the country’s history, destroying 11 developments and more than 20,000 units in the Jane Addams Homes, Cabrini-Green Homes, Robert Taylor Homes, Henry Horner Homes, Ida B. Wells Homes and others.
In many cases, the mixed-income units that the CHA vowed would replace them never materialized as planned. Even today, the museum, whose north wing now includes just 15 units of mixed-income housing, is surrounded by yawning blocks of undeveloped lawn, barren but for no-trespassing signs posted by the CHA.
Though these empty city blocks appear overlooked and forgotten, the National Public Housing Museum is a significant step in ensuring their former residents — like Hatch Sr.’s mother, Helen Holmes Jackson — are not. When the elder Hatch walked through the apartment, “his” apartment, he was overcome with emotion when he spotted the peanut brittle tin full of “Helen’s Surprise.”
“The night she died, I wanted to watch a Western, and she wanted to watch the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She had a high school diploma, but she was such a smart person — literally cultured. And all she did was have babies and die,” he says. “Her being in this museum brings it full circle.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
The National Public Housing Museum is open Wednesdays-Sundays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (closed Mondays and Tuesdays) at 919 S. Ada St.; admission free; guided apartment tours $15-$25 and scheduled online at nphm.org
