Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Settlement-house rooms, labor records, immigrant arts, maps, and community programs examine reform, paternalism, democracy, and displacement on Chicago’s Near West Side.
Artwork inspired by Archibald Motley
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull-House in 1889 within an immigrant neighborhood, and the settlement grew into a complex offering education, childcare, arts, labor organizing, health programs, and political reform. The museum values that work while examining unequal power between reformers and neighbors rather than accepting a simple story of benevolence.
Only two principal buildings remain after urban renewal and the construction of UIC displaced much of the surrounding community. Read the landscape as evidence: preserved dining rooms and offices stand beside campus superblocks, highways, and later memorialization. Exhibitions frequently connect historical debates about labor, migration, gender, and citizenship to contemporary organizing.
- Founded
- 1889
- Founders
- Jane Addams · Ellen Gates Starr
- Surviving campus
- Two principal buildings
Quick guide
- Map the neighborhood
- Locate former tenements, factories, streets, and the settlement complex before focusing on preserved rooms.
- Test reform language
- Ask who defined community needs, controlled resources, and received credit for collective work.
How to make Jane Addams Hull-House Museum count
- Map the neighborhood
- Locate former tenements, factories, streets, and the settlement complex before focusing on preserved rooms.
- Test reform language
- Ask who defined community needs, controlled resources, and received credit for collective work.
- Follow one program
- Trace childcare, theater, labor, health, or education from a room to its political consequence.
- Read the erasure
- Compare the surviving house with UIC’s campus plan and displaced community.
Good to know
Open Tuesday–Friday from 10 a.m. to 4:50 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; closed Sunday and Monday. UIC garages and metered streets are nearby but paid. The CTA Blue Line UIC-Halsted station and several buses provide direct access.
Notice these
- Residents’ Dining Hall
- Labor Museum history
- Urban-renewal landscape