Chicago Hauntings: Ghosts, A Portal, And A Devil Baby At Jane Addams' Hull House CBS Chicago

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• ( 413-5353   jahh@uic.edu800 S. Halsted Street (M/C Chicago, IL 60607-7017Privacy Policy
• World War I
• Jane Addams: A Hero for Our Time
• Co-Founding Chicago's Hull House
• Chicago Hauntings: Ghosts, A Portal, And A Devil Baby At Jane Addams' Hull House
• Life Without Light: Creatures in the Dark With Sarah McAnulty
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It began with a converted mansion on Halsted Street, and later expanded to a 13-building complex that covered nearly a whole city block. Prior to creating Hull House, Addams completed her education at Rockford Female Seminary. The president of her class, Addams was a bright and ambitious woman born to a well-connected family. Her father, Illinois senator John Addams, left a sizeable inheritance that enabled her to pursue her education even further.

( 413-5353   jahh@uic.edu800 S. Halsted Street (M/C Chicago, IL 60607-7017Privacy Policy

The settlement house movement, which began in the late 1800s, saw volunteers settling in poverty-stricken neighborhoods and creating social and cultural institutions to provide resources to the people living there. The Hull-House settlement complex was demolished in 1963 to make way for the University of Illinois Chicago campus, and only two of the original 13 buildings remain. Both are designated as protected historic landmarks and now make up the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

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Part of a new generation of college-educated, independent women that historians have called “New Women,” she sought to put her education to greater use. Although her religiosity waned under the heavy Christianity of Rockford, her commitment to the greater good increased. For the next six years, she attempted to study medicine, but her own poor health derailed her. Addams found her true calling while in London with her friend Ellen Gates Starr in 1888. The pair visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house on the city’s East End that provided much-needed services to poor industrial workers. Addams vowed to bring that model to the United States, which was in the early years of escalating industrialization and immigration.

Jane Addams: A Hero for Our Time

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The museum commemorates the work of the Hull-House Settlement, the lives of those in the neighborhood, and the continuing fight for social change that Hull-House was part of over a century ago. The work of Jane Addams and Hull House empowered both individuals and families and stirred social reform for more than 120 years. Impacting everything from women’s issues to workers’ rights, Addams and Hull House were dedicated to improving the conditions of Chicago lives.

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He owned a successful mill, fought in the Civil War, was a local politician, and counted Abraham Lincoln among his friends. Addams also grew up with liberal Christian values and a deep sense of social mission. An ardent advocate for women's rights, Addams was elected vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1911 and campaigned actively for women's right to vote. Addams also worked to reform employment agencies, many of which used dishonest practices, especially in dealing with vulnerable new immigrants.

Thorstein Veblen eviscerated the idle rich and coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Alice Hamilton fulfilled Jane Addams’s dream by graduating, in 1893, from the University of Michigan’s medical school. Living on and off at Hull-House in the 1890s, Hamilton attempted to identify causes of typhoid and tuberculosis in the surrounding community, became an expert on lead poisoning, and went on to have an exceptional career in public health.

She is probably best known as a co-founder of Hull House in Chicago, one of the first social settlements in North America. She was appointed to Chicago’s Board of Education in 1905 and helped found the Chicago school of Civics and Philanthropy before becoming the first female president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. With Starr, Addams rented the Charles Hull mansion in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood and Hull House opened its doors on September 18, 1889. Addams and Hull House led the progressive charge in Chicago and in the United States. The work of Hull House resulted in numerous labor union organizations, a labor museum, tenement codes, factory laws, child labor laws, adult education courses, cultural exchange groups, and the collection of neighborhood demographic data.

In 1889, Jane Addams, an idealistic college graduate, rented a run-down mansion on a derelict strip of Halsted Street in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. The neighborhood was home to thousands of recently arrived immigrants—Italians, Greeks, Russian Jews, Bohemians, and Irish. Addams, like many young people, was searching for purpose and meaning. Her plan was to use the mansion to improve the lives of the urban poor.

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The establishment of the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois in 1963 forced the Hull House Association to relocate its headquarters. The majority of its original buildings were demolished, but the Hull residence itself was preserved as a monument to Jane Addams. The Museum and its many vibrant programs make connections between the work of Hull-House residents and important contemporary social issues. Addams had a heart attack in 1926 and remained unwell for the rest of her life.

Mrs. Addams expressed her fond hope that Jane and George would marry one day. George did have romantic feelings for Jane, but she didn't return the sentiment. Jane Addams was never known to have had a romantic relationship with any man. Jane Addams had set her sights on Smith College, a prestigious women's school in Massachusetts, with the goal of eventually earning a medical degree. After months of preparing for the difficult entrance exams, 16-year-old Jane learned in July 1877 that she'd been accepted at Smith. Jane's father ran a successful mill business, which enabled him to build a large, beautiful home for his family.

After attending a bullfight in Spain in 1888 with a close friend, Ellen Gates Starr, Addams confided her dream that together they would plant a replica of Toynbee Hall amid the tenements of Chicago. Addams gave up her dream of becoming a doctor, took her father’s generous inheritance, and, with friends and her stepmother, traveled twice to Europe in pursuit of self-cultivation and purpose. But art museums and opera did not give her peace or satisfy her slumbering social conscience. Not always serious and priggish, Jane could also be irreverent, even naughty. In her autobiography, she confesses that she and some classmates at the seminary read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey and even went so far as to imitate the author.

Smith organized weekly concerts and included songs from the students' homelands in the repertoire. Motivated to physically improve the putrid conditions of her neighborhood, Jane Addams (pictured here in 1896) arranged to have a garbage incinerator installed at Hull-House and was appointed inspector of garbage in 1895. Addams’s closest companion was Mary Rozet Smith, a tall and attractive debutante, trustee of Hull-House, and one of its leading benefactors.