Where did Jane Addams grow up and live?

📍800 S Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA

1889 – 1935

“I co-founded Hull House on the Near West Side of Chicago in 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr, in a rundown mansion in one of the city's most impoverished immigrant neighbourhoods. We moved in and made it our home — this was the essential principle, that those who wanted to help the poor had to live among them. Hull House grew into a complex of thirteen buildings providing childcare, education, legal aid, and cultural programmes to the surrounding immigrant community. I lived there for the rest of my life. The neighbourhood was Italian, Greek, Jewish, Polish, Russian — the human variety of the great immigration. Chicago's immigrant Near West Side was the most important classroom I ever attended, and Hull House was both home and school for forty-six years.”

👍 LovedThe extraordinary human diversity of Hull House's neighbourhood. The principle of living among those you want to help, which made everything more honest. The community of women who shared the work and the life.

👎 DislikedThe poverty of the surrounding neighbourhood and the inadequacy of what any settlement house could do against structural inequality. The political opposition from those who preferred charity to justice. The exhaustion of institutional life.

Map showing where Jane Addams lived — 800 S Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Jane Addams's home at 800 S Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Brown, V. The Education of Jane Addams (2004), University of Pennsylvania Press; Addams, J. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Macmillan