This summer, the National Public Housing Museum has remained visible in its community on Taylor Street, particularly with two events, Green It! and Festa Italiana. Both occur annually in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood. With Taylor Street as its main thoroughfare, the National Public Housing Museum sits well-positioned in the neighborhood, also known as University Village, to serve as a center for community and neighborhood exchange.

Each August, the NPHM, which plans to open in the fall of 2018, creates community planting days to galvanize Taylor Street neighbors and Museum supporters to beautify the front of the future Museum building, the last extant building of the former Jane Addams Homes. I’ve covered how this event, formerly called Greening the Grounds, has helped us form a part of our inclusion model that we’re continually perfecting as we seek to strike a balance among the Museum’s many publics, including public housing residents, community members, academia, and housing practitioners. 

The Museum has developed a relationship with our nearest neighbor, Taylor Street Farms, a local community garden, and its leader, Sally Freeman, to plant five-gallon-sized plants inside of the Museum’s planter boxes. The planter boxes, constructed by a long-time Museum volunteer and master gardener, Hollis Turner, have weathered six Chicago winters and serve to signal the community the tenacity of Museum organizers and supporters to ensure the inevitability of the Museum and its power as a lasting monument to the public housing experience on the Near West Side. This said, the plants die from year to year, so for the past three years we have been cleaning up the beds with new plants and mulch to keep the dream alive.

By including community members in physically shaping the environment of their neighborhood, literally planting in the dirt and rubbing elbows with our friends, we’ve done more to educate people about the work of the Museum than arguably any of our programs: we want people to get involved. As we lay out the mulch and freshen up the 1938 brick masonry building at Taylor and Ada Street, we seek to communicate the permanence of community spirit in a transitory space, seemingly absent of an immediate community, but so full of life.

In continuing our outreach with the community, each August, the Museum takes part in Festa Italiana, the annual Little Italy street fair. The festival, which brings out several neighborhood vendors and restaurants, also allows organizations like the Museum to come out and talk about the Near West Side’s public housing history. Many of our table’s visitors come readily with stories of when they lived in the neighborhood, whether in the former Jane Addams Homes or the Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts, and Abbott Homes, all within a fifteen-minute walk of Taylor Street. 

As we continue to build ideas for ongoing programming, we find we return to these two programs, both happening in August, that bind us most closely to the people of our neighborhood. Next year, as we gear up construction for the Museum, we will look to these individuals we touched during the same week to create storytelling events, and spaces that further develop and elevate the public housing narratives of Chicago. The Near West Side is a rich center for these stories, and we owe it to our community presence in this resilient neighborhood, the added relevance of our very institution.