25-04-2025
At the National Public Housing Museum, an Embattled Idea Finds a Home
The items on display at the new National Public Housing Museum in Chicago are almost defiant in their ordinariness. There's a hammer once used by a resident of the city's Stateway Gardens development; an iron skillet from a family living in Houston's Cuney Homes; a hose that once watered communal vegetable gardens at leafy Lathrop Homes, one of Chicago's first federally funded public housing projects. A future famous face peers out: US Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in New York City's Bronxdale Houses, in her middle-school graduation gown.
One of the flashiest items in this opening exhibit, 'History Lessons: Everyday Objects from Public Housing,' is a studded leather vest with 'Raiders' spelled out in sparkling silver Gothic text, a garment that belonged to Chicago housing advocate Marion Stamps. A resident of Cabrini-Green Homes on the Near North Side, Stamps negotiated gang truces and led a rent strike against the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. But she had a life beyond protest and politics; on a motorcycle, 'she could just be Marion, and not the activist, freedom fighter, all of the titles that went with it,' says her daughter Tara Stamps, who spent her early years in Cabrini-Green and is now a Cook County commissioner. 'People who put their bodies and their lives on the line in service to other folks need a place to just be themselves.'
