In 1968, Crystal Palmer and her family moved to the seventh floor of the Henry Horner Homes. It felt like penthouse living: No longer did she and her siblings have to sleep three to a room, and other residents on the floor left their door unlocked, like a big family.

“We ate together; we cried together,” she recalled. “We’re still a family today, those of us that are still living.”

Palmer is a Chicago Housing Authority lifer. She returned to Henry Horner as an adult, moving out 14 years ago. Today, she’s CHA’s assistant director of resident engagement. What “outsiders or naysayers” may not realize about public housing is that the projects were, for many residents, the “best place (they) ever lived,” Palmer said.

Likewise, Evanston resident Sunny Fischer was dazzled when she moved into the Eastchester Projects in the South Bronx as a 5-year-old. Here was somewhere her grandmother could keep kosher, somewhere where her mother no longer had to chase mice with a broom.

“When we walked into that apartment, I still remember the light: It was so bright, and everything was so clean,” Fischer said.

Today, Fischer and Palmer sit on the board of the National Public Housing Museum, which opened on the Near West Side in the spring on the former site of the Jane Addams Homes, near the University of Illinois Chicago.

Fischer said visitors have the same reaction to the museum that she did as a child to the Eastchester Projects: astonishment that it could be so nice.

A gleaming LED display in the lobby recaps decades of public housing history. Nearby, the museum’s gift shop promotes small businesses and merch by public housing residents. Upstairs are an oral history studio and an interactive listening room, allowing visitors to spin LPs by musicians who once lived in public housing.

Walking through all of those spaces is free for visitors, five days a week. But the soul of the museum is its recreation of units occupied by two resident families: the Turovitzes, a Jewish immigrant family that moved into the Jane Addams Homes shortly after the homes opened in the 1930s, and the Hatches, an African American family that lived there in the 1960s and ’70s.

In Palmer’s words, the museum outlines “the good, the bad and the ugly of public housing, or any government program.”

A recreation of a public housing unit with elements from the 1960s and 1970s is on display at the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago on July 11, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)

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As part of the museum’s “artist as instigator” residency, Chicago-born rapper Open Mike Eagle will build on his 2017 concept album “Brick Body Kids Still Daydream,” drawing on his family history in the razed Robert Taylor Homes in Bronzeville. Painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn will also open an exhibition in May 2026 reflecting on the Taylor Homes.

The museum owes its existence to two “founding mothers.” Activist and housing commissioner Deverra Beverly advocated for what would become the National Public Housing Museum more than 20 years ago, responding to the 1999 Plan for Transformation that led to the destruction of 11 CHA developments, including the Horner, Taylor and Addams projects. Beverly died in 2013, and Fischer helped see the museum through, operating it more or less as a pop-up in the intervening years.

About half of the museum’s staff members have lived, or still live, in public housing, and still more have experienced housing insecurity. The museum maintains an active presence in current CHA programming, attending project reunions and coordinating special tours for residents. The onsite ambassadors who guide visitors through the museum — such as Humboldt Park resident Gentry Quinones — are also current CHA residents.

The National Public Housing Museum at 919 S. Ada St. in Chicago, July 11, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)

“When I bring that up to people, you can see the change in their faces,” Quinones said. “People end up sharing very personal stories.”

To sum up the museum’s message, executive director Lisa Yun Lee is drawn to — what else — a housing metaphor.

“I love this quote Isabel Wilkerson has, where she says that America is an old house. We’re all living in this house now, and we inherit whatever’s wrong with it. You could say, ‘Hey, I didn’t cause that,’ but that’s your house now,” Lee said. “The history of public housing is our collective house that we all live in.”

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/17/chicagoans-of-the-year-museums/