Hull House, History museum in Near West Side, Chicago, United States
Hull House is a two-story red brick mansion in Chicago's Near West Side, built in the Italianate style with tall narrow windows, a yellow-trimmed porch, and a black metal fence along South Halsted Street. It is now the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, displaying the original 1856 house and a relocated community refectory.
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded the center in 1889 after visiting a similar initiative in London, creating the first American social settlement project. Over the following decades, twelve additional buildings were added to the original house, though most were demolished starting in the 1960s.
The house takes its name from Charles Jerald Hull, its first owner. Hull House was a secular settlement, unlike religiously affiliated settlements, and its residents were mostly university-educated women. They offered free concerts and lectures to the neighborhood, and their 1895 Hull-House Maps and Papers mapped eighteen nationalities within a one-third-square-mile area.
The museum sits on South Halsted Street near the University of Illinois campus and is accessible by public transport. A walk through the rooms takes about an hour and suits visitors interested in social reform and urban development.
The rooms hosted music performances and theater evenings where local residents took part. The site also held a public bathhouse, one of the first of its kind in Chicago, drawing hundreds of visitors each day.
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