The National Public Housing Museum
The National Public Housing Museum on the Near West Side opened Friday, April 4, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on a day filled with symbolism and awareness of the lives of poor families who, despite their financial struggles, built proud memories during hard times.
“Today, we recognize more than just an opening of a museum. This is a preservation of vital history,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.
The museum is in the last remaining building that was once the Jane Addams Homes, one of many public housing developments under the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA).
Inside, visitors can explore exhibits that include replicas of a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and living room in a public housing project apartment. There is an exhibit that educates visitors on the harsh realities of an eviction.
In one living room, there are copies of Ebony and Jet magazines on a table.
A trip to the museum could be a journey down memory lane for Blacks in Chicago, where some of the nation’s largest housing projects stood for decades before Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration demolished them.
The museum opened on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, who faced stiff resistance in Chicago, where he campaigned for housing, which for decades has been a challenge for Blacks during and after The Great Migration. Half a million Blacks moved to Chicago from the South during 1916 to 1970. Many lived in slums before public housing projects were built from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Today, many of the city’s largest projects are gone, including Robert Taylor Holmes and Cabrini Green. The iconic television show Good Times was based on characters living in the Cabrini Green project.
Inside the National Public Housing Museum is a replica of the apartment where the Evans family persevered through hard times and overcame financial hurdles as their bond grew stronger.
The museum fulfills the vision of public housing leader Deverra Beverly and other housing advocates who, in the late ’90s, had the idea to start a museum about public housing.
After several delays over the years, officials broke ground to renovate the building in October 2022.
But just under a week old, the museum already faces possible funding cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration. His administration this week canceled $175 million in federal funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That will take away $1 million from Illinois Humanities, which provided financial help to institutions like the National Public Housing Museum.
Illinois organizations that received federal humanities funding in the past three years are the Adler Planetarium, the Newberry Library, the Field Museum, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, and several colleges and universities.
In a statement, the Field Museum, which also receives funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), said it had received $1.8 million in federal grants since 2018. “IMLS was the second largest source of federal agency funding for the Field,” the museum statement said. “These grants have been very important to how we fulfill our mission, and it would be a significant disappointment if that funding were to end.”
The National Museum of Public Housing is bracing for the impact. Executive Director Lisa Yun Lee said the impact of losing federal humanities funding is not yet clear.
Lee reportedly received a letter earlier in the week from National Endowment for the Humanities officials as the organization was preparing to open with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Lee said she was told that the new museum’s “vision and mission didn’t align with the executive office.”
Lee told WBEZ, “We’re waiting to see what happens with the legality of [the cut]. I never thought that the work of the NEH and the NEA and all of these institutions that represent the American people were supposed to only align with the executive office’s mission.”