What is the ethnic history of the Jane Addams Hull House...the Hull House Neighborhood?

Answer 1

The most important criticism is the failure to reference the symbiotic relationship that existed between Hull House and the residents of "The Hull House Neighborhood." Quoting the Taylor Street Archives: UIC: Flawed Hustory, [1]Taylor Street's Little Italy was the laboratory upon which the Hull House elite had tested their theories and formulated their challenges to the establishment.

The symbiotic relationship that had existed between Hull House and Taylor Street, the port-of-call for those Italian Americans who had emigrated to Chicago, has been documented from the very beginning of Hull House's existence. One of the first newspaper articles ever written about Hull House (Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1890) acknowledges the following invitation sent to the residents of the Hull House neighborhood. It begins with: "Mio Carissimo Amico"…and is signed, Le Signorine, Jane Addams and Ellen Starr. It was not written in Greek, Jewish, Polish, German, or Norwegian...nor was it written in English. That invitation to the community, written during the first year of Hull House's existence, was written in Italian.

Alice Hamilton, medical professional and early member of that elite group was quoted as saying, "Those Italian women knew what a baby needed more than my Ann Harbor professors did." The ancillary literature between, among and about members of that Hull House elite is littered with such comments reinforcing the symbiotic relationship that existed between Taylor Street's Little Italy and Hull House.

During the glory days of Hull House, the inner core, the heart and soul of the neighborhood that surrounded Hull House proper, was Italian-American. Other ethnic groups had long vacated the neighborhood by the time the offspring of those emigrant parents, the first generation Italian Americans, arrived on the scene. Only the businesses of those non-Italians remained on the outer fringes of what Jane Addams named "The Hull House Neighborhood."

The history of Taylor Street's Little Italy and the history of Hull House and the Hull House summer camp (Bowen Country Club) are not separate and distinct. Neither is complete without the other. Meet the 'Hull House Kids' appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, April 5, 1987. While the article was written in 1987, the picture, taken on a summer day in 1924, depicts twenty young boys posing in the Dante school yard on Forquer Street (now Arthington Street). The historic picture was taken by Wallace K. Kirkland Sr., who became a top photographer with Life magazine. The Sun-Times article lists the names of each of the young boys and refutes an earlier attempt to label them as being of Irish ethnicity. All twenty boys were first generation Italian Americans…all with vowels at the end of their names. "They grew up to be lawyers and mechanics, sewer workers and dump truck drivers, a candy shop owner, a boxer and a mob boss."

The Bethlehem-Howard Neighborhood Center Records further substantiates (per Jane Addams own words) that, as early as the 1890s, the inner core of "The Hull House Neighborhood" was overwhelmingly Italians. "Germans and Jews resided south of that inner core (south of twelfth street)…The Greek delta formed by Harrison, Halsted and Blue Island Streets served as a buffer to the Irish residing to the north and the Canadian-French to the northwest." If those were the Demographics as early as the 1890s, the flight of those ethnic groups shortly after the turn of the century suggests that not only were the "Hull House Boys" from Arthington Street of Italian extraction, but the entire community from the river on the east end on out to the western ends of what came to be know as "Little Italy" -from Roosevelt Road on the south to the Harrison Street delta on the north--was virtually all Italians.

Jane Addams' writings also contradict the flawed 1895 federal census which misrepresents the number of Italian-Americans residing in the inner core of the Hull House Neighborhood. There are many reasons why Italian immigrants would mislead a stranger knocking on their door to inquire about the number of residents who resided in their home. Many Italian Americans were sent back to Italy after being interviewed by Ellis island government officials when they first arrived. The "Black Hand" extortionists were part of the Italian American culture. The "White Hand" extortionists, via non-Italian politicians, were not hesitant to use the city's housing codes to impose their will. There was the constant fear that they may be exposed as being illegally hired by their employer. And on...and on...and on...!