In the Turovitz family’s modest, neat apartment on Chicago’s Near West Side, there are treasured kiddush cups in the cabinet, a Yiddish newspaper on the coffee table and a box of Wittenberg matzos on the kitchen counter.
But the Turovitzes haven’t lived here for almost 100 years. The rooms are a recreation that forms part of the National Public Housing Museum, which opened April 4.
The result is a celebration of public housing that resembles New York’s celebrated Tenement Museum, which captures the stories of immigrants who lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Public housing is often portrayed in a negative light, but Chicago’s new museum offers a moving counter narrative by offering the meticulously detailed stories of real families in their own words.
“When you say ‘public housing,’ it conjures up feelings in the American public and psyche, usually stereotypes,” Lisa Yun Lee, the museum’s executive director and chief curator said. “We counter these stereotypes with the real stories of people who have lived in public housing, which is an incredibly diverse group of Americans. One of our mottos at the museum is never again will a single story be told as if it’s the only one.”
Visitors can tour rooms in the last surviving building of the Jane Addams Homes, one of the first Chicago Housing Authority projects built in the 1930s. A central part of the project is the apartments of two families: the Turovitzes, a Russian-Jewish family who lived in the apartments in the 1930s; and the Hatches, a Black family who were residents in the 1960s. Both have been painstakingly recreated to show the humanity, resilience and joy of those who lived there.
In the Hatch family apartment, there’s a pile of Jet magazines, a black-and-white TV, a record player, and a collection of encyclopedias and novels by Dickens. In both the Turovitz and Hatch homes, framed photographs of smiling family members decorate the walls.
Although the Jane Addams Homes were among the first racially integrated public housing developments in the country, by the 1950s and ’60s, discriminatory policies meant that white residents moved out — often with federal assistance denied to Black residents — and public housing stock became run-down and neglected.
Integrated into the tour, shown in a separate room between the two apartments, is a original, animated installation that uses shadow puppetry by Manual Cinema and narration by Princeton professor Keenanga-Yamahtta Taylor to powerfully set out this history of racial discrimination through redlining, restricted covenants and blockbusting.The museum makes it clear that the profound damage inflicted by these policies continues to impact society today.
“There needs to be a broad coalition and movement to address and redress the history of housing injustice,” Ms. Lee added. “It’s not just about public housing, it’s also about addressing affordable housing for everyone and homelessness. All three of these issues should be brought together as a movement to make sure that housing becomes a human right. These are all issues we need to care about.”
