Hull-House exhibit reveals settlement’s role in inspiring Chicago’s open spaces
(Photo Credit: Library of Congress)
A current exhibition at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on UIC’s campus is celebrating how the settlement fostered urban gardening and laid the groundwork for public playgrounds in Chicago at a time when urban residents were largely cut off from nature.
In 1896, a group of “landless gardeners” gathered at the Hull-House settlement while Chicago was in the throes of an industrial revolution that saw green space quickly gobbled up to make way for factories and tenements. They wanted to make public land available to people living in tenements who didn’t have outdoor space of their own to garden. Gardening was a way to improve public health and for factory workers to grow fresh food and make extra cash selling produce.
Through historical photos and objects, “Perennial City: Experiments in Urban Gardening” shows how the settlement fostered urban gardening and green spaces in Chicago. The exhibit is on display at the museum until Dec. 15.
“I always want people to be inspired by our exhibitions,” said Ross Stanton Jordan, the museum’s curatorial manager. “I also want folks to understand the scale that the reformers at Hull-House were imagining at.”
Fostering enterprise
Artifacts and photos from the early years of the settlement illustrate how Hull-House was an incubator for groups such as the City Gardening Association, which sprang from the earlier gatherings of landless gardeners who met at Hull-House.
The association, founded in the early 1900s by Hull-House resident Laura Dainty Pelham, secured a 90-acre lease from International Harvester near its factory on the south branch of the Chicago River. About 100 immigrant families, from diverse backgrounds and all associated with Hull-House, each received one-eighth-acre parcels to farm.
They exchanged ideas and farming tips, grew enough to eat and sold the rest, earning each family about $1,000 seasonally in current dollars. The project was so successful it spurred the creation of gardens in vacant lots throughout the city.
“Once you make space for gardens, all of a sudden the knowledge of those immigrants becomes super useful, and they can apply it to the land, which begins to transform what Chicago looks like,” said Stanton Jordan.
Return to nature
As the settlement was focused on the creation of parcels, it also had to deal with the large number of children navigating the city streets, which were becoming more dangerous with horse-drawn carts and automobiles.
To serve this need, the settlement sparked the city’s first playground, which opened near the intersection of Polk and Halsted streets in 1894, just a few years after Hull-House opened. By the end of the decade, the city established a commission to build municipal playgrounds across Chicago, according to Stanton Jordan.
“It was part of a movement for playgrounds,” said Stanton Jordan. “At the time, Chicago was full of children, and they were playing in the streets, running in the streets.”
Having playgrounds in urban environments became key to providing open space for children to play and learn. The settlement employed adults to lead activities at the playground and even created a “recreation school” that trained sociologists to use children’s games as teaching tools.
In an open-air school and rooftop garden, built above the settlement nursery, children learned to grow herbs and flowers. A second, adjoining open-air school operated between 1909 and 1920 for children with tuberculosis, allowing them to tend their own rooftop gardens and continue their education year-round in a setting with medical care and increased airflow. The Chicago Public Schools then opened its own open-air schools to deal with the tuberculosis epidemic in the early 20th century.
“All of these things from the first playground to the open-air schools, all those interventions were from Hull-House trying to use nature as a positive for the neighborhood and for the immigrant population,” said Stanton Jordan.
Also featured in the exhibit are large maps and other work by celebrated landscape architect Jens Jensen that detail a network of city parks on Chicago’s West Side. Jensen served on the board of the settlement’s City Gardening Association and as superintendent of Chicago’s West Park system. He designed and oversaw the creation of Humboldt, Garfield, Douglass and Pulaski parks, and others.
Current artistic visions
The exhibition also highlights artwork by contemporary local artists Carlos Flores, Olly Costello and Melissa Potter.
Flores’ work at the museum includes several altars built in modified wheelbarrows, including one with a seed library that displays several types of flower and vegetable seeds and dried plants.
According to Flores, the wheelbarrow altars are meant to evoke a “religious procession as well as the everyday nature of community maintenance by day laborers.”
Also featured are a series of prints on paper made from the pulp of plants found outside the museum by Red Line Service artists under the tutelage of artist and educator Melissa Potter. The group focuses on bringing cultural resources to people experiencing homelessness, and the artists are creators who have experienced homelessness or housing insecurity themselves.
“The partnership between Red Line Service and the Hull-House Museum aims to create conditions where democratic activity can flourish,” said Stanton Jordan. “It also affirms that parks and natural spaces belong to everyone—and that everyone deserves a voice in how cities allocate space.”
