Building Momentum with Out of the Archives

Presented during a momentous year for the National Public Housing Museum—including opening our long-awaited home on the corner of Taylor and Ada Streets and signing our first union contract—Out of the Archives Season 4 experimented with a seasonal approach to our beloved oral history-based podcast.

Covering episodes 23–26, Season 4 was curated by Museum Registrar & Assistant Curator, jellystone robinson, with support from Senior Program Manager of Oral History, Liú Chen. As a former resident of the Ida B. Wells Homes Extension, a filmmaker and poet, and one of the first graduates of the Museum’s Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History, jellystone brings creativity and lived experience directly into the curatorial process, and complements Liú’s background in history and equity-focused archival practices. Together, jellystone and Liú curated, scripted, and co-hosted a 4-episode arc of some of our strongest episodes to date, and invited audiences into an aural journey centering public housing residents’ conversations about equity and displacement.

With particular emphasis on the national trend towards privatizing public housing, this season blends historical context with narrators’ reflections on their memories, hopes and dreams for public housing communities and lands. Across four episodes, we dig into crucial pieces of public housing history while also using sound design techniques to compliment our narrator’s storytelling with great care: integrating sound effects, news coverage, documentary excerpts, and ambient music to create a more textured soundscape for our listeners.

Learn more and listen to full episodes from Season 4 below:

Episode 23: “‘This is still my neighborhood’: Memories of Taylor Street and The Village” highlights cycles of demolition and displacement in Chicago’s Near West Side neighborhood—where the National Public Housing Museum is based. From before the city of Chicago existed, to the 1930s “slum clearance” that made space public housing, to the 1999 Plan for Transformation that included the demolition of over 18,000 public housing units in favor of a mixed-income, private ownership model, this land has seen many cycles of development, displacement, and redevelopment. Former ABLA residents Janetta Pegues and Allen Schwartz remember how their community has changed over time. 

Episode 24: “‘Beauty is Remembered’: A Mother’s Fight for Public Housing” tells the story of Beauty Turner, the namesake of our oral history training program, pulling from interviews with her eldest son, other Robert Taylor Homes residents, and documentaries that featured the dearly departed resident advocate herself. As a journalist, poet, and founder/leader of the GHETTO Bus Tours, Ms. Beauty devoted much of her life to warning about the devastating impacts that the City of Chicago’s demolition-based Plan for Transformation would have on both the working and middle classes.

Episode 25: “‘We Ate Good!’: How U.S. Policy Shaped Sharing in Public Housing Communities” builds on the previous episodes about privatization policies by examining how other state and federal policies—from marriage requirements to so-called “Man in the House” policies to the Vietnam War—had devastating and disproportionate effects for Black communities. Narrators in Chicago and Miami illustrate how public housing communities always stepped up to help their neighbors and push for a more just world, even in the face of domineering policy decisions.

Episode 26: “‘How can we make it livable for all?’: Housing Justice is Environmental Justice” digs into how the privatization of public housing intersects with another vital social issue of our time: environmental justice. Narrators in New York City and Miami unpack how mixed income, privatized public housing is both fueled by climate change (a phenomenon dubbed “climate gentrification”) and perpetuates climate change because of its prioritization of demolition and redevelopment over rehabilitation of existing housing units.

Follow our narrators across the season to hear familiar voices share different life experiences that connect into larger historical trends. For example, Dr. Richard Morgan and Ms. Betty Thompson are heard in both episodes 24 and 25, describing the ways policy changes impacted Robert Taylor Homes residents’ day-to-day lives. And Ms. Anna Williams, who first talks about her family’s generosity in feeding the Liberty Square community in episode 25, is central to episode 26 as she shares the broader story about how Liberty Square came to exist in the 20th century—and gentrified because of climate change in the 21st century. Listeners had the opportunity to learn more from Dr. Morgan, Ms. Betty, and Ms. Anna as the season went on, building a greater sense of intimacy with these beloved narrators. 

Alongside the release of Season 4, we explored similar themes of education, culture, public policy, and narrative change through other museum programs and platforms, including:

• The launch of our online Public Oral History Archive in late 2024. This public archive allows us to share the full length interviews from which each episode was curated with our audience. In new episodes, and retroactively for seasons 1–3, we have prioritized archiving at least 1 full-length interview from each episode of the podcast. Our Oral History Collective continues to work tirelessly on post-production and re-engaging narrators so that we can continue to grow the number of interviews available on the website. 

• We activated Out of the Archives Episode 23 through our Remembering Taylor Street Interactive Listening & Mapping programming, during which the locations in the episode and in other archival interviews are mapped out on a large map of the Near West Side of Chicago where the neighborhood where the museum is based. Program participants were invited to listen to an excerpt of the podcast, listen to additional audio via QR codes on cards pinned to the map, and pin their own descriptions of memories to the map.

• Episode 24 delves into the life and legacy of Ms. Beauty Turner, the eponymous housing activist of the Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History program, which teaches public housing residents and loved ones across the country how to gather and preserve stories from their own communities. In 2025, we graduated 9 new oral historians through the summer training, adding Los Angeles, Memphis, and the Detroit area to our geographic reach and bringing the program’s total graduates to nearly 50. Over one third of our graduates have gone on to contribute to the Oral History Programs in some way, whether as interviewers and transcriptionists for the Archive, voting members of our Archive Working Group who determine our policies and practices, mentors for new Beauty Turner Academy participants—and even as full time staff members, in the case of jellystone!

• Episode 26 featured interviews with two housing and environmental activists who have been featured in different documentaries about public housing: Razing Liberty Square, which the museum screened in a 2024 public program, and A Home Worth Fighting For, directed and produced by the National Public Housing Museum’s 2025 Artist as Instigator Natasha Florentino. Residents featured in A Home Worth Fighting were also included in a short film created by Natasha for a 2025 NYCHA-focused exhibition that the museum hosted for five months, Living in the Shade, which explores the role of open space in creating more livable, healthy, and thriving communities.

• Mr. Allen Schwartz and Ms. Janetta Pegues are two of the Museum’s earliest oral history narrators to be interviewed and archived on our Public Oral History Archive. They gracefully agreed to a second, joint oral history interview back in late 2023 from which we would curate a clip for an interactive sidewalk installation on the Taylor Street side of the Museum. Their conversation was so rich that we had to archive it and curate a full podcast episode from it—episode 23, the first of season 4! This Taylor Street Memories installation will be unveiled in April 2026 along with another outdoor audio installation in the Alphawood Foundation Sculpture Garden, home to Edgar Millar’s Animal Court (explored in season 1, episode 9 of Out of the Archives). 

We are grateful for our community of narrators, oral historians, educators, archivists, memory workers, and listeners! We encourage you to keep listening and sharing our oral history based work with the ones you love. We also welcome new narrators and ideas for activating the podcast via email at [email protected].

Stay tuned—after this tremendous season for the museum and Out of the Archives, we are excited to continue building off that momentum in season 5.