National Public Housing Museum Opens In Chicago

On April 4, Chicago marked a significant moment in its history with the opening of the first-ever museum dedicated to the city’s public housing legacy. The National Public Housing Museum, located in the last remaining building from the Jane Addams Homes—Chicago’s inaugural public housing development—now offers a deep dive into the stories and experiences of the families who once lived there. 

What’s inside the museum?

The museum allows visitors to explore three apartments from the historic development, each one showcasing the oral histories of former residents, as well as artifacts, photographs, and textures from the original units that stood from 1938 to 1975. According to its website, this immersive experience also provides a deeper understanding of the broader national public housing policies that impacted residents. 

One exhibit showcases a recreated three-bedroom apartment that once served as the home for 10 members of the Hatch family, an African American family led by Rev. Elijah Hatch and his wife, Helen Holmes Hatch. The couple relocated to Chicago from Mississippi and Tennessee in 1960, seeking a better life after their home was destroyed by a fire.

In an interview with WBUR published on April 8, their daughter, Josephine Hatch-Skipper, shared that it felt surreal to revisit her childhood home at the museum. 

“You’re seeing a Great Migration story. A family that came to the North for a better life, wanted better for their children, created this family that was strong. And I think we have exceeded our parents’ dreams, so that’s why it’s nice to come back,” she shared .“This is almost like a full-circle moment coming back to our parents because I’m so grateful for how we grew up.”

The National Public Housing Museum’s history will also explore the experience of public housing life in other cities across the U.S. One of the museum’s curators, an Instagram user named @Jayah.A, created the permanent installation Feeling at Home with each piece in the exhibit carefully curated to reflect the lived experiences of public housing residents in New York. The installation includes textures, furniture, and photos from some of the residents’ apartments, giving visitors a peek into their lives in the Big Apple.

The History of Jane Addams Homes.

The Jane Addams Homes, first constructed in 1938 as part of the New Deal’s Public Works Administration (PWA), were named after the pioneering social reformer and are located on Chicago’s Near West Side, according to the Society Of Architectural Historians (SOAH). These homes marked a milestone following the 1937 Housing Act and were the city’s first public housing project. Designed to address the housing crisis caused by the Great Depression and to improve living conditions for impoverished immigrants, the development consisted of 1,027 units spread across 32 buildings, arranged to form semi-enclosed courtyards with playgrounds and landscaped areas.

The Jane Addams Homes were just the beginning of a larger initiative by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), which later expanded to create the ABLA Homes, a network of four public housing developments—Addams, Brooks, Loomis, and Abbott—shaping the landscape of public housing in the city for years to come. Gentrification ultimately led to the demolition of most of the Jane Addams Homes in the late ’90s, prompting wealthier residents to call for the demolition of the ABLA Homes, SOAH noted.

In response, former Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced his Plan for the Transformation of Public Housing in 1999, signaling a major shift toward redeveloping public housing sites into mixed-income communities. As a result, most of the ABLA Homes and all but one building of the Jane Addams Homes were demolished. By 2022, the Addams Homes site was set to be redeveloped into Roosevelt Square, a mixed-income development that will feature 2,441 units, including 755 subsidized apartments. Thanks to the activism of ABLA residents, the last remaining Addams Homes were preserved and repurposed to house the new National Public Housing Museum.

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