Revisiting Minnesota’s “Open House” Exhibition in the Age of ICE

Twenty years ago this week, the Minnesota History Center in Minneapolis’ sister city of St. Paul launched an interactive exhibit called “Open House: If These Walls Could Talk.” It was the most elaborate exhibition the museum had ever attempted. Five thousand Minnesotans came out in the bitter cold of January on opening weekend to see a real house that had been reconstructed inside the museum, like a ship in a bottle. Successive generations of Americans – more than fifty families, over more than a century – had lived in the house, at 470 Hopkins Street, wave after wave of newcomers and immigrants, travelers who made Minnesota and the United States their home. The exhibition told their story as well as that of America. He has won awards, broken records and changed the way museums tell stories. It is also an archive of a lost America.

This weekend, on the streets of Minneapolis, masked agents from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency shot and killed another American, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti. He, like the poet Renée Good, who was shot dead by ICE earlier this month, was among thousands of Minnesotans who took to the streets, even amid bitterly cold temperatures and a howling snowstorm, to protect their state’s immigrants from assault, arrest, separation from their families and deportation. US immigration policy had become a travesty under the Biden administration. But nothing about fixing this policy justifies the Trump administration’s wild, vengeful, and unconstitutional deployment of “surges.” ICE agents in American cities, their anarchic, masked and gratuitous violence, or their immunity from prosecution. Across the Twin Cities, immigrants, whether in the United States legally or not, are hiding in their homes, afraid to leave, afraid to even look out their windows. Is America still our home?

The “open house” was led by Benjamin Filene, curator of the Minnesota History Center, who is now deputy director of public history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “The original idea was to do an exhibition on immigration,” Filene explains. But he and the design team wanted to put visitors in a real place and allow them to hear the real voices of real people. He decided that this place should be a home: a container of families, stories and objects. He found the house, still standing, in a neighborhood called Railroad Island. “No one famous has ever slept there,” Filene says. Only ordinary Minnesotans slept there, and still sleep there, if there is any sleeping to be had.

Filene and his colleagues tracked down and interviewed everyone they could find who had lived at 470 Hopkins, or who was descended from anyone who had lived there, for more than a century. They recorded oral histories; they made period rooms. And then, inside the museum, they built a reimagined version of the house, in which each room featured the furnishings and stories of a different generation of immigrants and newcomers. Two Germans, Albert and Henriette Schumacher, built the house in 1888. You could meet them and hear their stories in the living room. Then came waves of railway workers, Scandinavians, especially Irish, renting rooms in a constantly evolving house, subdivided into two dwellings, then three; even the house number has changed. Filene found them in the city directories: James Doyle, depot foreman, Northern Pacific Railroad; Frank Appleton, night watchman. Harry and Eva Levey: Mother tongue: Jewish. In the kitchen, if you opened the oven, you could listen to Michelina Frascone, who emigrated from Naples in 1931 at the age of eleven, talking about raising seventy-five chickens in the cellar. Frascone’s father had worked on the railroads for ten years to save the money needed to bring Michelina and her mother to America. Next came Rust Belt migrants, African Americans who had settled in the Twin Cities from Gary, Chicago and Detroit in the 1980s and, finally, Hmong refugees who had fled postwar Laos, some of whom were still living in the house when its near-replica opened in the museum, two miles away.

Every room in the house had interactive, motion-triggered features. When you sat down at the dining room table, Michelina Frascone began to tell you the story of her uncle, Filomeno Cocchiarella, who had to go out on Thanksgiving evening to repair the railroad tracks. “Please don’t go,” she had begged him – and he had been hit and killed by a train. In the bedroom, as you sat on the bed, you heard a man of Scandinavian descent who had married an Italian woman telling the story of how one night the bed collapsed, and as he was telling it, the bed suddenly buckled beneath you. Pang Toua Yang and his wife, Mai Vang, who appeared on television in the living room, told the story of their escape from Laos with their six children, their crossing of the Mekong and their years spent in Thai refugee camps until, four years later, they arrived in Minnesota. Their daughter also appeared in the exhibition; she became a go-getter real estate agent, selling homes to more new Americans.