New Episode of “Out of the Archives” Series Features Stories of Taylor Street Residents
Chicago, Illinois (October 7, 2024) – The National Public Housing Museum, the first museum in the United States dedicated to telling the stories and sharing the history of public housing in this country, today announced that its Oral History Archive is now available to the public for the first time on the National Public Housing Museum’s website. The archive, which has been 15 years in the making, is the heart of the museum’s work, capturing more than 150 interviews focused on the history, present, and future of public housing in the United States. The Oral History Archive is now live and available at www.nphm.org.
The Oral History Archive is a powerful repository of stories from public housing residents, academics, and community leaders. The archive is expected to attract interest from scholars, the families of the narrators who have entrusted their stories to the National Public Housing Museum, as well as from artists, activists, and organizers working to shape a more just future. Among the first available from this archive are interviews with Dr. Timuel Black, Tanisha Wright, and Crystal Palmer.
“When Commissioner Deverra Beverly first conceived of a museum dedicated to public housing, her vision was to begin with an archive of the stories of the residents themselves,” said National Public Housing Museum Executive Director Lisa Yun Lee. “Making our archives, curated over the last 15 years, available to the public as we prepare to open the Museum is a call to our nation to expand and include the voices of public housing residents in the national conversation about housing justice. These narratives and stories of resilience, community, and humanity will be accessible to all who want to learn from them.”
Importantly, the National Public Housing Museum’s archiving process distinguishes itself by including some of the most robust ethical policies to ensure that each narrator maintains autonomy over how their story is told and shared. “It is important to remember,” Lee emphasized quoting the writer Rebecca Solnit, “It's always someone else's story first, and it never stops being their story too, no matter how well you tell it, how widely you spread it.”
To accomplish this, the NPHM’s Oral History Collective, a team of trained memory workers, conducts interviews, manages post-production for each story, and reviews interview materials in collaboration with narrators.
As part of a commitment to developing the most accessible public archive, the National Public Housing Museum is also activating the oral histories through a curated podcast series called Out of the Archives with a recently released episode featuring former residents of the Jane Addams Homes and ABLA community, reflecting on their experiences of Taylor Street, home to the Museum itself, including the neighborhood transformations they have witnessed. Excerpts from this session will be part of an outdoor installation on Taylor Street when the Museum opens in early 2025.
The National Public Housing Museum’s Oral History Archive was established with lead funding from the Mellon Foundation. Additional support for the archive’s expansion and public accessibility is provided by The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.
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Images Available at National Public Housing Museum Media Center
ABOUT THE NATIONAL PUBLIC HOUSING MUSEUM
Over the past century, more than 10 million people across the United States have called public housing home. In the late 1990s, as thousands of public housing units across the country were being demolished, public housing residents began to dream about creating a museum to preserve their collective voices, memories, and the histories of public housing across the nation. They wanted their children and grandchildren, and the public at large, to know more about their place in the American experience and to understand the public policies that helped to shape their families. In 2007, civic leaders, preservationists, historians, cultural experts, and many others joined with residents to help incorporate the National Public Housing Museum, which has since then offered transformative programs that connect the past with contemporary issues of social justice and human rights. The Museum’s permanent home is under construction at the historic Jane Addams Homes at 919 South Ada Street in Chicago’s Near West Side, and is set to open to the public in January 2025. For more information: https://www.nphm.org/
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