Fra Noi June 2010
The Hull House Neighborhood
If we do not act now, the following will be our epitaph:
“…and it came to pass that, for those who follow us, it will be as if we never were.”
Hull House was founded in 1889. The first invitation to the neighborhood residents (1890) was written in Italian. It began, “Mio Carissimo Amico” and was signed, “Le Signorine, Jane Addams and Ellen Starr,” founders of America’s first settlement house. (Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1890) Jane Addams labeled the immigrant slums of the near-west side, “The Hull House Neighborhood.”
The Bethlehem-Howard Neighborhood Center Records further substantiates 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 12th Street). The Greek delta, formed by Harrison, Halsted and Blue Island served as a buffer to the Irish and Canadian –French” on the north. The inner core, from the river on the east on out to the western ends of what came to be know as Taylor Street’s Little Italy, became the port-of-call for Chicago’s Italian American immigrants.
Meet the ‘Hull House Kids,’ a historic picture taken by Wallace K. Kirkland Sr., Hull House Director, on a summer day in 1924, circulated the globe as a poster child for the Jane Addams’ Hull House. Kirkland, who became a top photographer with Life magazine, identified the 20 boys as being of Irish ethnicity. On Sunday, April 5, 1987, over one-half century later, the Sun-Times refuted that earlier attempt to label those twenty young boys, posing in the Dante school yard on Forquer Street (now Arthington Street), as being of Irish ethnicity. All twenty boys were first generation Italian Americans--all with vowels at the ends 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.”
Taylor Street’s Little Italy became the social laboratory upon which the Hull House elitists tested their theories and based their protests to the establishment. While the Jewish and Greek immigrants began their exodus from the neighborhood during the early part of the 20th century, their businesses, Greektown and Jewtown (Maxwell Street) continued to flourish. Only the Italian enclave remained as a vibrant community through the roaring twenties, prohibition, the great depression, WWII, the disruption of the expressways, and the ultimate betrayal and dismemberment of the Jane Addams’ Hull House Neighborhood to make room for the UIC.
Taylor Street’s Little Italy maintained its dominance as the Hull House Neighborhood throughout its Camelot days. That dominance is confirmed by records that managed to survive the 1963 holocaust and takeover by the UIC. Of the 257 alumni, of Hull House’s Bowen Country Club summer camp, known to serve during World War II, virtually all but a hand full were Italian-Americans, confirming the ethnic demographics that existed during the 74 year history of Hull House.
The Hull House Museum currently serves as the only source of information for historians, students, and public alike researching the Hull House phenomenon, which, by definition, must include Taylor Street’s Little Italy. That information, by both omission and commission, is flawed! The director of the Hull House Museum is quoted as saying, “History should include the story of those who lived it.” Yet, the massive bibliography the Museum controls does not contain a single Italian-American writer who lived the experience of growing up in the Hull House Neighborhood. The most recent reason given publicly by the UIC for excluding the written works of Italians who lived the Hull House experiment, is, “Italians were not the only group. Hull House served 24 other ethnic neighborhoods.” (Medill School of Journalism. Northwestern University.) Fact: It was only after the physical demise of its 13 building complex (1963) that Hull House began “serving 24 other ethnic neighborhoods”…and that was out of emergency store fronts that were set up throughout the city.
The Taylor Street Archives (TSA) was founded in 2004 to repudiate the flawed history being dispensed to historians and scholars by the UIC, usurpers of the Jane Addams Hull House. The TSA evolved to ensure that the symbiotic relationship that existed between Taylor Street’s Little Italy and the Jane Addams’ Hull House is neither usurped nor redefined by those who were not part of that Taylor Street phenomenon. The TSA web site serves as a giant family tree preserving the names, pictures, and stories of our immigrant parents and their first generation off-spring.