Hull House – Chicago

Hull House was a Chicago settlement house founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. It was located at 800 S. Halsted St. in Chicago, in the area where UIC campus is now located. Hull House was named after the first owner (and builder) of the house/mansion, Charles Jerald Hull. It provided social services to the large numbers of immigrant families and individuals that came to Chicago to work in the many factories.

The services offered included: classes in literature, history, art as well as classes in domestic activities such as sewing. They also held free concerts, lectures on current issues and offered clubs for children and adults. Also, because the Hull House community/neighborhood was comprised of diverse ethnic groups such as Italians, Germans, Greeks, Poles and more, Addams and Starr decided to hold ethnic evenings at Hull House. During Italian night, for example, there would be Italian food and music and maybe a speaker of that ethnicity. The ethnic evenings helped the immigrants connect with memories of their homeland that they missed so much.

The Hull House also did important things for the neighborhood and is an important part of Chicago history. It established Chicago’s first public playground, bathhouse and public gym and instituted educational and political reforms to housing, working and sanitation matters, in an effort to improve the lives of immigrant families and children. They offered more than 50 programs at over 40 sites throughout Chicago and served approximately 60,000 people every year.

Hull House’s charter was: “To provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.”

Between 1889 and 1935, Hull House became a large complex, with 13 buildings surrounding the original Hull House mansion. It remained in the original location until 1963 when it was sold to University of Illinois Circle Campus (UIC).

Today, only the Hull Hose mansion building and Craftsman style dining hall remains and is called the “Hull House Museum”. The museum is a part of the College of Architecture and the Arts department at UIC and is a memorial to Addams and other social reformers. It houses over 1,100 artifacts related to Hull House history and over 100 oral histories/interviews about Hull House and surrounding neighborhood.