A Day In Chicago - October 2011

Yesterday morning I finally made it to the Jane Addams Hull House Museum.  I have wanted to go there for several years.  Thursday evening I traveled to my friend Linda's house in Valparaiso and on Friday morning we caught the South Shore into Chicago.  First on the agenda was the Jane Addams Hull House Museum.  The trip in on the train was especially interesting due to the fact we were joined by several school buses of middle school students.  It was NOT a quiet ride into the city.  On a good day the South Shore is crowded but normally the back of one's head is not in danger of being bumped by feet.  Never the less after disembarking the South Shore we caught a city bus to the area where the University of Illinois Chicago Campus is.  After climbing off the bus we only had to walk about a half mile rubbing shoulders with  all the twenty something students on the sidewalks and we arrived at the Hull House.  We lucked out because there was a class of university students being given a tour/lecture at the museum so we just joined them and listened in.  The entire time I was in the house the hair on my arms was just standing up on end.  There are many things that struck me
especially interesting.  For example,  Jane Addams started the Hull House in an immigrant neighborhood that was at the time of the early 1900s mostly Eastern European Immigrants.  There was no water or plumbing in the neighborhood so one of the first things they did was provide a daily bath for children.  They started a day care like setting and later a kindergarten for the children of the working moms.  As time went on they realized that they were limited in the services they could offer to older children because at about age six the little ones joined their older siblings and parents in the work force.  Therefore the Hull House became involved in the labor union movement in order to improve working conditions so children could go to school.   Jane Addams was also involved in the Peace Movement which was not a popular movement during the first world war.  In fact besides winning the Nobel Peace Prize http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.html she was also considered one of the most dangerous women in the country by the FBI which had a very large file on her.  She was inspired to begin her work with the Hull House when she visited Europe after graduating from college.  In London she visited Toynbee Hall  http://www.toynbeehall.org.uk/page.asp?section=30&sectionTitle=History+of+Toynbee+Hall  and there she then knew what she wanted to be her life's work.  The Jane Addams Hull House Museum can be found on the web at
http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/ and is a place that I would encourage any one in the Chicago area to visit.