The Third Case

The local history room on the second floor of the Halsted Street library in Chicago is not really a museum. It's one room, three glass cases, and a librarian who also runs the children's hour on Saturdays. But the sign on the door says “Museum,” and the room has one job: to educate people about who used to live on their own street.

The first case consists of eleven objects, and none of them are historical in the way visitors expect. There is no famous person here. There is a wooden shoe form from a shop that closed in 1961. There is a Lithuanian prayer book with a bus ticket inside it, used as a bookmark and never taken out. There is a soup pot big enough to wash a small child in, given by a family who ran a restaurant on the corner for thirty years. There is a photograph of nine men outside a factory gate, and under it a card that lists eight names and, for the ninth man, only the word “unknown.”

The second case belongs to the people who came later: a bakery's first order book, a phone card from 1998 with the minutes worn off the back, a school certificate printed in two languages.

That's the whole exhibit. A hundred years of immigrant history in a room the size of a classroom, in a neighborhood where the shop signs have changed language three times.

The interesting part is the third case. It started out empty, except for a card that reads, “This case is for the next hundred years. If you live here now, bring us something.”

When the exhibit opened, the librarian expected nothing at all. In eighteen months the case has taken in a delivery-bike lock, a menu in three languages, a hospital bracelet, and a photograph of a family standing in front of a moving van, smiling, on the day they left.