The history and legacy of the Jane Addams Hull House and the neighborhood it served. Vincent Romano, Editor and contributor, Taylor Street Archives.
About the writer.
Vincent Romano was born to immigrant parents of Italian origins. Both parents were part of the great migration of Southern and Eastern Europeans that occurred at the turn of the 20th century. Vince grew up in and is a product of Taylor Street, Chicago’s Little Italy, the port-of-call for Chicago’s Italian American immigrants.
Like many first generation Italian American’s, Vince’s identity was, in-part, the creation of the neighborhood and its institutions. Among those institutions was the Jane Addams Hull House, America’s first settlement house. The Taylor-Halsted area became known as “The Hull House Neighborhood.” Later, Vince hired on as a social worker with Hull House and also served as a counselor for the Hull House summer camp, which was known as the Bowen Country Club. Reversing roles, he now became a contributor to the fashioning identities of waves of first and second generation Italian Americans that followed him. It is from this unique perspective, which evolved from having been both the recipient of and contributor to that Taylor Street phenomenon that sets Vince apart from most writers of the Italian American experience.
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The mission statement of the Hull House Museum, which gives it the legitimacy to call itself a museum and to be funded as such, states, in part: “…to preserve the legacy of the Jane Addams Hull House and the neighborhood it served.”
Given that the story of the Jane Addams Hull House and the neighborhood it served is being rewritten to the liking of the UIC and the administrators of the Jane Addams’ Hull House Museum (JAHHM), this document is being written to preserve the true history and legacy of that phenomenon we know as, the Jane Addams’ Hull House. It will be housed in the Taylor Street Archives website, which had been created to counter the flawed history being dispensed and the ethnic cleansing campaign being orchestrated since the administrative reign of Lisa Lee, as the museum’s director, and her chief of staff, Lisa Lopez Junkin.
Jane Addams and Ellen gates Starr founded and opened America’s first settlement house in 1889. Their intent was to serve the needs, both recognized and unrecognized, visible, and subtle, of the inhabitants of Chicago’s near-west side immigrant neighborhood. They chose to do so, not as visiting social workers, but as inhabitants of the community sharing the same phenomenological space as the immigrants.
The Hulls donated their house, the Hull House, located in the near-west side community, in the 800 block of South Halsted Street. Hull House became the anchor of what eventually became a 13 building settlement house complex.
TO BE CONTNUED