Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

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Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Photo courtesy of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

The University of Illinois at Chicago

800 S. Halsted

Chicago, IL

Website:  Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

The Treasure:  Hull-House was America’s most famous settlement house—a place where the ideals of the Progressive Era were put into practice, improving the lives of thousands.

Accessibility:  The museum is open Tuesday through Fridays from 10 to 4 and Sunday from noon to 4.  It’s closed Mondays and Saturdays.

Jane Addams.
Image from Hull-House
Yearbooks, courtesy of
University of Illinois at
Chicago Library.

Background:  Jane Addams took the ideals of the Progressive Era and put them into practice.  Hull-House, a settlement house co-founded by Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, was her incubator.  Through a wide array of programs and activities, Addams and Starr endeavored to improve the lives of the residents of some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.  They fought for better urban living conditions, while creating a safe environment where disadvantaged people could benefit from the free offering of arts, culture, and education.

A reformist social movement that began in London in the middle of the 19th century, the settlement movement sought to bring the upper class and the lower class together in environments of mutual respect.  Largely driven by the idealistic concerns of upper-middle-class and upper-class women, the settlement movement was extremely flexible, ready to engage in social work, cultural and art activities, recreational programs, and education.  Hull-House was not the first American settlement house, but thanks to the drive of Addams and Starr it quickly became a beacon of the movement in the United States.

Known as “residents,” the volunteers who worked at Hull-House offered a buzzing environment of classes, concerts, lectures, theater, and training programs.  They served a local community that was a complex maze of small ethnic neighborhoods.  Initially, they primarily worked with Italians, Irish, Germans, Greeks, Bohemians, and Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants.  As immigration and migration patterns began to change the makeup of the neighborhoods, Hull-House reached out to Mexican-American and African-American families, as well.  It was always the working poor that were the focus of Hull-House—the people who worked long hours as unskilled laborers at the garment industry sweatshops and the factories along the Chicago River.

At the Front Door of Hull House.
Historic photo from Hull-House Yearbooks, courtesy of
University of Illinois at Chicago Library.

In the city’s poorest sections, sanitation was poor, wages were low, and young children were recruited for some of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.  Hull-House was on the forefront of advocating for improved government services and tougher industry regulations.  Hull-House offered an oasis where families could imagine a better future.  Jane Addams wrote, “To feed the mind of the worker, to lift it above the monotony of his task and connect it with the larger world, outside of his immediate surroundings, has always been the object of art.”  Following her vision, Addams organized and promoted art classes and training programs to unleash creativity and tap latent talents.

Today, the Jane B. Addams Hull-House Museum is an historic site that tells the story of America’s most famous settlement house.  Exhibits explore the lives of neighborhood children, the commitment of the residents who worked at Hull-House, artwork by Chicago artists who trained and taught at Hull-House, historical photographs of the neighborhood, and the restored bedroom of Jane Addams, where you can see her 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, the first ever given to an American woman.

But the real story of Hull-House lies in the thousands of changed and transformed lives that passed through it.  One exhibit explores two of those lives:  Hilda Satt Polachek and Jesús Torres.  Born in Poland, Polachek immigrated to the United States and Chicago when just a little girl.  At the age of 18, she began attending courses at Hull-House and discovered a talent for writing.  Her memoir of her time at Hull-House, I Came a Stranger:  The Story of a Hull-House Girl, was published posthumously in 1989 and is one of the best windows into life inside a settlement house.  A Mexican migrant, Jesús Torres learned ceramics at the Hull-House Kilns, receiving instruction from Russian immigrant artist Morris Topchevksy in the 1930s.  Thanks to his Hull-House training, Torres became a successful and widely admired ceramic artist, doing much work with Chicago’s Carl Street Studios.

The oldest known photograph of Hull-House.
Photo courtesy of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Hull-House at it looked in the 1920s.
Photo courtesy of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

A children's art class at Hull-House.
Image from Hull-House Yearbooks.  These images were
preserved through a 1999 Save America's Treasures grant.
Through this grant, master negatives, use negatives, and
use prints were produced for an estimated 5,000
photographs and 1,500 yearbook images from the
collection of the University of Illinois at Chicago Library.
Image courtesy of the University of Illinois at Chicago Library.

Other Recommended Sites:  Many Mexicans came north in the 1920s, looking for work at the Chicago factories.  They settled into neighborhoods, bringing a vibrant culture and traditions with them.  Fittingly, Chicago is now home to the National Museum of Mexican Art located in Pilsen on the Lower West Side.  The museum showcases the beauty and richness of Mexican culture which has flourished not just in the country of Mexico but throughout the Americas.

A painting of Hull-House that served as a basis for the 1960s restoration.
Image courtesy of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Tour America's History Itinerary

Thursday’s destination:  Feehan Library, Mundelein Seminary

© 2013 Lee Price