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Tour the Last Jane Addams Homes Building in Little Italy This Week

By Stephanie Lulay | September 30, 2015 5:33am | Updated on September 30, 2015 6:51pm
 The former Jane Addams Homes building today, 1322 W. Taylor St.
The former Jane Addams Homes building today, 1322 W. Taylor St.
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DNAinfo/Stephanie Lulay

LITTLE ITALY — As part of an open house, history and architecture buffs will have the chance to tour the last remaining Jane Addams Homes building Saturday.

The National Public Housing Museum, the non-profit that plans to take over the shuttered Taylor Street building, and the UIC Great Cities Institute, will present the opening reception for a series of exhibits focused on public housing and architecture Saturday. The exhibits will be hosted within a suite of the "ruin apartments" in the last remaining building of the historic Jane Addams Homes at 1322-1324 W. Taylor St.

The opening, from 2-5 p.m. Saturday, will include a Q&A session from 2-3 p.m.

After Saturday, the "House Housing" exhibit will be open to the public from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. through Nov. 15 in partnership with the Chicago Architectural Biennial.

Built in 1938, the Jane Addams Homes building — part of the larger ABLA Homes complex on the Near West Side, which stands for Jane Addams Homes, Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts and Grace Abbott Homes — opened in 1938 as the first federal government housing project in Chicago. Hundreds of families lived in the three-story brick building over six decades, and the building has been vacant since 2002.

The interior of the last remaining Jane Addams Homes building today. [DNAinfo/Stephanie Lulay]

Using multiple mediums and told in 23 episodes, the "House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate" exhibit, will encourage a public, historically informed conversation about the intersection of architecture and real estate development. The collection, part of a multi-year research project conducted by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, includes historic photographs of towers demolished by the Chicago Housing Authority and public housing floor plans designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

With the "Collection, Building, Action" exhibit, the National Public Housing Museum will share artifacts from its own collection, including Tenant Patrol jackets donned by indigenous housing leaders in the 1980s and 1990s, a coffee pot from an Irish immigrant family living in public housing in the 1940s and the nine-foot long sales center model of Roosevelt Square, the planned but unfinished mixed-income real estate development in the area.

The National Public Housing Museum will also exhibit "We, Next Door," a creative and critical response to "House Housing" by Chicago teens who currently live in public housing. 

Todd Palmer, the museum's curator, said the exhibits will shed a new light on architecture and public housing efforts in Chicago.

"In 2014 in Venice at the Biennale that inspired Chicago's effort, international visitors encountered the 'House Housing' exhibition's questions about the distorting power of real estate on the lavish third-floor apartment of Columbia University's Casa Muraro," Palmer said. "It becomes even more significant to bring these issues into the context of our building on Taylor Street, the last of 32 still standing on 24 acres. It's telling that much of that remains still vacant — testament to the interaction of real estate forces and affordable housing policy."

Attendees can RSVP for Saturday's opening online.

Museum plans opening in 2017

In the works since 2006, National Public Housing Museum leaders now plan to break ground on the museum in early 2016 and open the museum in 2017. Charles Leeks, the museum's executive director, said he is working with Chicago Housing Authority officials to get the necessary approvals to move forward with the project.

Stephanie Lulay discusses the museum's future plans:

Named after the pioneer social worker, Nobel Prize-winner and Hull House founder Jane Addams, the homes were built under the Public Works Administration Act, created to provide jobs and help boost the country out of the Great Depression.

To preserve the legacy of public housing in Chicago, the National Public Housing Museum plans to restore four of the apartments in the building, giving visitors an idea of what it was like to live in the ABLA homes through different periods in history.

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