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Public housing museum plan moving ahead
By Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune
July 20, 2008
Architects are optimists by nature, as Chicago architect Peter Landon demonstrated last week as he took me on a flashlight-guided tour of an abandoned, derelict Chicago Housing Authority building near the fashionable Taylor Street restaurant strip. Paint was peeling off the walls. Thieves had stripped bathtubs of their hardware. Steel stairs were covered with rust.
Landon thinks the 70-year-old, three-story building, empty since 2002, would make a terrific site for a national public housing museum. So does a non-profit headed by CHA resident leader Deverra Beverly and Sunny Fischer, the executive director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and herself a former public housing resident.
"Look at the concrete work," said Landon, of the firm Landon Bone Baker Architects, as he shone a flashlight on an exposed concrete ceiling. "Pretty nice."
Big-name backers
The proposal for the public housing museum, which first came to public attention four years ago, is gathering steam, though "not in my backyard" opposition still could thwart it. The CHA's Board of Commissioners, which has agreed to donate the building to the non-profit, is expected to turn over control of the site Aug. 19, museum organizers say. They are further heartened because two Illinois Democrats, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, are backing the museum's request for $5 million in federal funding. Mayor Richard M. Daley is among the other political leaders on board while the museum counts Chicago-based Boeing Co. as one of its financial backers. The non-profit, which pegs the project cost at $17 million, wants to open the museum in late 2012, complete with exhibition space, a restaurant and gift shop.
To those who regard the plan as a gruesome joke—a museum celebrating hellish high-rises?—there is a simple retort: Not all public housing was high-rise. And not all the stories are bad ones. The point of the museum is to keep the memories alive, not only to provide a touchstone for former public housing residents, but also to learn from the past and build better communities in the future.
That's why it makes sense to recycle the building at 1322-24 W. Taylor St., the lone remaining structure left from the Depression-era Jane Addams Homes, which were razed to make way for a new mixed-income development called Roosevelt Square. It's the real deal, designed in a stripped Bauhaus style by a team of architects led by Chicago's John Holabird of the renowned firm Holabird & Root.
Good intentions
Look beyond the boarded-up windows, and you see a model exercise in doing more with less: a symmetrical brick facade, originally punctuated by steel-sash windows that brought in ample natural light and allowed for cross-ventilation. Architectural details, such as streamlined porches, relieved the austere aesthetic. Along with a courtyard that allowed many parents to watch their children from their apartments, clusters of apartments grouped around multiple entries gave the place a human scale missing from the infamous, postwar mega-projects.
Though all that is hard to see today, the building nonetheless offers silent testimony to the best intentions of public housing. Nothing else can match the authenticity of this place.
That said, the tattered building desperately needs a new image, especially if it is to attract visitors from around the region and be something other than an eyesore that mars the Taylor Street restaurant district.
Landon's plan adeptly addresses this issue, proposing to extend the building's Taylor Street front outward by 10 feet to make room for a two-story restaurant. The enlarged zone would be clad in a metal-mesh screen that would wrap around the corner but pointedly stop short of covering the entire Taylor Street facade. The see-through layering would reveal the past even as it endowed the building with a fresh identity.
There are no interior renderings yet, but floor plans make clear the plan's intelligence: Visitors would enter on a side street (perfect for school buses).
Exhibits and other functions would ring a internal courtyard that would be formed by closing off the open "U" to add space for a lecture hall, rental space and a possible roof deck above.
The exhibits would include mocked-up apartments that would portray, through furnishings, music and other details, what life was like for families who lived in the building—Italians, Germans, Jewish, Irish, Filipinos and African-Americans. The successful Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City has already shown that such storytelling techniques can work
Perhaps the museum idea seems crazy. But it would be crazier still to erase a tangible record of human experience that has its share of heartwarming success stories as well as highly publicized failures. Architecture can help make that point, even if its troubled surface conceals its true identity.
"The bones are good," Landon said, ever optimistic, as he gazed at the building's boarded-up skin. "They built things to last."
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