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

Twenty years ago this week, the Minnesota History Center, in Minneapolis’s twin city, St. Paul, launched an interactive exhibition called “Open House: If These Walls Could Talk.” It was the most elaborate show the museum had ever attempted. Five thousand Minnesotans came out in the frigid January cold on opening weekend to see an actual house that had been reconstructed inside the museum, like a ship in a bottle. Successive generations of Americans—more than fifty families, across more than a century—had lived in the house, at 47src Hopkins Street, wave after wave of newcomers and immigrants, travellers who made Minnesota, and the U.S., their home. The exhibition told their story as the story of America. It won awards, broke records, and changed how museums tell stories. It is also an archive of a lost America.

This weekend, on the streets of Minneapolis, masked agents of the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency shot and killed another American, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti. He, like the poet Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE earlier this month, was among thousands of Minnesotans who have taken to the streets, even amid brutally cold temperatures and a howling snowstorm, to protect immigrants in their state from assault, arrest, separation from their families, and deportation. U.S. immigration policy had become a travesty under the Biden Administration. But nothing about repairing that policy justifies the Trump Administration’s savage, vengeful, and unconstitutional “surge” deployment of ICE agents in American cities, their lawless, masked and wanton violence, or their immunity from prosecution. All over the Twin Cities, immigrants, whether they’re in the U.S. legally or not, have been hiding in their houses, afraid to leave, afraid, even, to peer out a window. Is America still home?

“Open House” was spearheaded by the Minnesota History Center curator Benjamin Filene, who is now the deputy director of public history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “The original idea was that we should do an exhibit about immigration,” Filene says. But he and the design team wanted to put visitors into an actual place and allow them to hear actual voices of actual people. He decided that place should be a house: a container of families and stories and artifacts. He found the house, which is still standing, in a neighborhood called Railroad Island. “No one famous ever slept there,” Filene says. Only ordinary Minnesotans slept there, and sleep there still, if there is still sleep to be had.

Filene and his colleagues tracked down and interviewed everyone they could find who had lived at 47src Hopkins, or who was descended from anyone who lived there, across more than a century. They recorded oral histories; they fabricated period rooms. And then, inside the museum, they built a reimagined version of the house, in which each room featured the furnishings, and the 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 sitting room. Then came waves of railroad workers—Scandinavian, Irish, especially—renting rooms in an ever-altering house, subdivided into two units, then three; even the house number changed.. Filene found them in 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 up the oven, you could listen to Michelina Frascone, who immigrated from Naples, in 1931, at the age of eleven, talk about raising seventy-five chickens in the basement. Frascone’s father had worked on the railroad for ten years to save up the money to bring Michelina and her mother to America. Then came the Rust Belt migrants, African Americans who had moved to the Twin Cities from Gary and Chicago and Detroit in the nineteen-eighties, and, finally, the 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 features triggered by motion. When you sat down at the dining-room table, Michelina Frascone started telling you the story of her uncle, Filomeno Cocchiarella, who had to go out on Thanksgiving night to repair the railroad tracks. “Please don’t go,” she’d begged him—and he’d got sideswiped, and killed, by a train. In the bedroom, when you sat down on the bed, you heard a man of Scandinavian descent who had married an Italian woman tell 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 a television in the living room, told the story of fleeing Laos with their six children, crossing the Mekong River, and spending years in Thai refugee camps until, four years later, they arrived in Minnesota. Their daughter appeared in the exhibition, too; she became a go-getter realtor, selling homes to more new Americans.