Category: Chicago

This post was presented by Rima Lunin Schultz at a session on Community Builders: Developers, Planning, & Civic Culture in the United States in the 20th Century, at the 13th Biennial Conference of the International Planning History Society, July 10-13, 2008.

After the death of its legendary co-founder Jane Addams in 1935, Hull-House trustees had to determine what role, if any, the old thirteen-building complex could play in the neighborhood that was being transformed by super highways, public housing, and the loss of population. They did so in the context of two historical movements: the migration of African Americans from the south to the urban North, that more than any other issue in the 1940s and 1950s challenged the deepest felt values and goals of the social settlement movement; and, the rising demand in local communities to democratize community organizations or agencies.

These two movements intersected in urban neighborhoods in the United States where the possibility of large-scale urban redevelopment threatened the status quo, especially the racial composition of communities. Hull-House, situated in such a neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side, decided to integrate and democratize its programs and staff, to remain in the neighborhood[1]; to support public housing; and to work with the neighborhood to develop a community-based plan for urban renewal.

The major tool to accomplish the goals of integration,  democratization, and community renewal, was an entity called the Near West Side Planning Board, an agency that was to be separately incorporated and independent of the settlement, but initially received staff and financial support. With this Planning Board, Hull-House hoped to create a process that would lead to vastly different outcomes from the typical model of urban renewal where land clearance and private development ignored the population being displaced. Instead, evoking the innovative spirit of the settlement movement as a vanguard of new social relationships in a democracy, Hull-House sponsored what it hoped would be an open and democratic process that could be used throughout the United States.  It was to include all elements of the community with the result that redevelopment would occur without displacement. The people of the neighborhood would be able to reap the rewards of the renewal rather than be forced out by rising real estate values and dispersed to other low-rent neighborhoods. This paper uses the case study of this community-based planning experiment to ask broader questions about community re-building in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century American cities.

 Without spending too much time on background, it seems important to comment on how the Hull-House settlement actually functioned in the neighborhood. [2] In 1935, The Hull-House settlement had existed for forty-five years as a private, not-for-profit association governed by a board of seven trustees, including Jane Addams who called herself “head resident” and did not take a salary. She was, until 1907, both the president and the treasurer of this board. The majority of the trustees had held their positions from the 1890s—when the system was put into place—until Jane Addams’s death in 1935, or, if they preceded her, their own death. The trustees, during the Addams’s years, were women and men who overall can be described as wealthy civic-minded progressives who were responding to the evils of the industrial city. Addams, one of their class,[3] had established the settlement with her own funds and they backed her “experiment” and accepted her leadership. Since Addams was a volunteer who invested her own money in the settlement, she fit a model of womanly benevolence not one of professionalism. The trustees were there to offer advice and counsel, not to supervise or to develop policy, unless asked directly. Addams, then, had a great deal of personal discretion and reigned almost completely unchallenged by the close-knit group of trustees.[4] In addition, Hull-House was not affiliated with a religious denomination or a university so had an enviable independent position. The meteoric rise to international prominence that Addams and the settlement achieved also gave her a protected status.[5] After her death, there were no head residents (now called directors) of equal stature or, obviously, whose relationship to the trustees had an equivalency.[6] This was very empowering for Addams and, I would argue, gave her the ability to speak out on many controversial stands without fear of reprisal, and to defend the rights of political dissidents worldwide. It allowed her to personally ally herself with unpopular causes and individuals, to establish radical organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and to maintain a large degree of freedom for the individual residents who came to live in the Hull-House complex. [7]

Hull-House was also a meeting place for unpopular groups from the neighborhood. Yet there was no thought that an individual who lived in the neighborhood and was active in the settlement should take a place on the board of trustees until 1943 when Alex Elson, who had grown up in the neighborhood and participated in Hull-House as a youngster, was selected by the board of trustees.[8]

The trustees had traditionally been among the settlement’s major contributors: multi-millionaire heiress and leading civic reformer Louise Bowen, who continued to dominate the trustees until her death in 1953; Mary Rozet Smith, Jane’s life partner and daughter of Smith Bragner, one of the country’s paper manufacturers ; Helen Culver, the heir of the Charles Hull real estate empire, and owner of the Hull homestead[9] and the property surrounding it; Mary Wilmarth[10], a feminist clubwoman and one of Hull-House’s earliest supporters; Julius Rosenwald, who owned Sears Roebuck, Co., and was a leading philanthropist known for his support of education for African Americans in the South and his sponsorship of the NAACP; and Sewell Avery, president of the U.S. Gypsum Company and Chairman of the Board of Montgomery Ward & Company. Completing the list of trustees were the philosopher John Dewey, wealthy businessmen and art patrons Edward B. Butler and Charles L. Hutchinson, and Allen B. Pond, architect.

When old-timers died, they were replaced by other family members or individuals well-known to those on the board. Charles Hull Ewing “replaced” his cousin, Helen Culver; Louise Bowen added her daughter Helen Bowen Blair in 1929 when the number of trustees increased from seven to nine.[11]

In the 1940s, when the number of actual trustee slots increased to 25, the categories of people who served expanded to include individuals who were prominent in the social welfare field as practitioners or professors, often who had been Hull-House residents in their younger years; less than a handful [four] of prominent African Americans [Robert R. Taylor, president of the Chicago Housing Authority; the Rev. Nathan A. Scott, professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School; Dr. Lloyd A. Hall, chemist;  and journalist Era Bell Thompson] and a group of businessmen and their wives, primarily real estate developers, who held prominent roles in metropolitan Chicago’s planning circles (James C. Downs, Jr.; Anthony Downs; Ruth Camp, wife of J. Beidler Camp; Harry Goldstine; Mrs. Ferd Kramer); and prominent liberals including Adlai Stevenson and Marshall Field, III. 

The original “residents”[12] of the settlement -–young women and men-—mainly affluent and well-educated—following the example set by Jane Addams, had included radicals, socialists, labor leaders and social reformers. The cross-class, cross-cultural relationships that were forged with the neighbors were intended to be cooperative rather than paternalistic, friendly rather than officious, and, at best, democratic in spirit.

Yet from the beginning, the neighborhood became a laboratory and the studies produced by the residents launched reform campaigns that would eventually transform the neighborhood, but for the first forty-five years or more, without neighborhood-led participation in the development of social policy. [13]

Under Charlotte Carr’s administration, serious efforts were made to reverse this pattern and to democratize Hull-House within itself as well as in its relationships with the community. Of course, a large aspect of that effort was to change race relations within the settlement itself and in the neighborhood. Arriving in October 1937, Carr, who had been the executive director of the New York City emergency relief bureau, openly advocated New Deal-style cultural expression and workers’ education, as well as civil rights.  Carr’s approach to the race issue as administrator of emergency relief in New York had impressed Dorothy Height, the civil rights leader who had witnessed Carr’s fairness toward blacks during the March 1935 riot in Harlem. The situation in March of 1935 was desperate for African Americans. While blacks were only 8 percent of New York City’s population, they made up 42 percent of the unemployed on welfare. They were even denied positions on work projects set up by the welfare system and there was not a single person of color in a position of authority on the management staff of the Welfare Administration. Carr remedied the problem by appointing Height to be personnel supervisor in the central office of the Home Relief Bureau.[14]

 The African American community in Chicago anticipated her move to the city. Carr’s network of labor and civil rights leaders and her friendships with these leaders were comparable to the kinds of inter-racial networks Jane Addams had formed at the high point of her influence, the difference being, of course, that Addams was a charismatic leader and that Carr never achieved that kind of recognition or influence. Jane Addams by 1912 had forged relationships with the black leadership and Hull-House was one of those places in a segregated world where African American women and men felt welcome. Addams co-existed with the contradictions that were part and parcel of Jim Crowism, was one of the founding members of the NAACP, but was unable to integrate Hull-House. Instead the work done by Hull-House among blacks, who by 1925 had settled in significant, although small numbers, south of the settlement[15], was carried out through the medium of the Hull-House Community Club, an organization of women affiliated with the State and National Federation of Colored Woman’s Clubs.[16] The Hull-House Community Club’s members remained a separate [and segregated] club in the settlement house from the late 1920s thru the early 1950s.[17] Their children were kept separate rather than encouraged to join in the myriad of clubs and activities available for White children. The persistence of ethnically separate activities at Hull-House in the 1930s and 1940s points to deeper and more complex cultural and racial issues.[18]

One of Carr’s first moves to integrate was to invite the first African American to Hull-House as a resident. She sought out Chicago Defender journalist Dewey E. Jones and his family, got a Rosenwald Fund stipend to cover his salary, and announced that Jones was going to investigate the conditions of African Americans in the neighborhood of Hull-House. Jones, who had been an advisor to Harold Ickes in Washington, D.C.,[19] was a good choice as the first African American resident at the House. Jones, his wife, Faith Jefferson Jones, a social worker; and their toddler, Dewey E. Jones, Jr., moved into the settlement in 1938.  Jones’s sudden death in April 1939, ended his work at Hull-House.[20]

Carr combined her efforts to integrate with community organization initiatives. Carr established a community relations department in 1939. Under the sponsorship of this department, two small neighborhood centers were started and operated by parents and a staff of neighborhood leaders who were made available by the Works Project Administration. One center was in the African American district south of the settlement and filled a need that had long been recognized by the Hull-House Community Club. As mentioned above, the Community Club had met since the 1920s, but had not been incorporated into the settlement life. Carr reversed this by empowering the African American women who were club members to run this new center located in their own neighborhood, with WPA and Hull-House funds. The women also reached out to African American businessmen who helped with funding. Activities within the center included a morning pre-school play group, afternoon game periods for school children, weekly dances and English classes for adults, with WPA leadership supervised by the Recreation staff of Hull-House. A mother’s club had been organized and was sponsored by members of the Hull-House Community Club. Carr felt that this center represented an activity where neighborhood leaders were making plans for themselves and carrying them out, with minimum guidance from Hull-House.[21]

Carr’s tenure with Hull-House ended in December 1942, after only five years, and, according to Carr, she had been fired.[22] There were charges of budget extravagance under Carr’s administration, but the record indicates that there was no budget crisis.[23] Bowen was offended by Carr’s politics, did not articulate what I believe was Carr’s real sin: successful efforts at organization and empowerment of the neighborhood. This would have been threatening in itself, but Carr believed that the neighborhood people must participate fully in the affairs of the settlement. She saw Hull-House as the community’s organization.  Her boldness in this direction, political columnist Sydney J. Harris argued, “often antagonized some board members, as did her insistence upon entering political controversies when she felt the welfare of ‘the little people was at stake’”[24] since she believed that she, as director of Hull-House, represented the little people against the special interests.

While many people who agreed with her approach liked to say she was carrying out the legacy of Jane Addams, Carr was attempting something very different from the kind of social relations Addams established with the neighborhood. Commenting on the departure of Carr, a member of the West Side Community Committee [different from the West Side Community Organization], who had spent his life in the neighborhood, said the fundamental issue was “who shall formulate the policies of Hull House? Does Hull House belong to the people it serves, or to the trustees? Shall it be an ‘agency’ superimposed from above; or shall it be an instrument of the people themselves? Only by involving the people significantly in the management of Hull House can it ever become a real part of the attitudes, sentiments and thinking of the people.” [25] 

Other social settlements faced the same challenges in the 1930s and 1940s, but few actively pursued a policy of integration or of democratization. Newer kinds of community organizations, like Anthony Sorrentino’s West Side Community Organization, developed out of University of Chicago sociologist Clifford Shaw’s Chicago Area Project, emerged to challenge the hegemony of established settlements like Hull-House. The West Side Community Organization was a group predominantly of neighborhood people of Italian background that emerged in the late 1930s as an alternative to the “traditional” top-down social agency approach. What is interesting about Hull-House settlement in this period is how the directors, staff, and residents attempted to move away from the top-down model while still retaining controls that resembled the top down model of a social agency.

One of the Hull-House residents who advocated for community organization was Eri Baker Hulbert, III, the grandnephew of Jane Addams.  From 1937-1940, he was counselor and head of tenant selection for Jane Addams Homes for the Chicago Housing Authority. The Homes were located in the Near West Side neighborhood less than a half mile west of the settlement complex.

It was Eri Hulbert who was given the task in 1947 of working with the other community organizations in the neighborhood. The major one was Sorrentino’s West Side Community Organization, mentioned above. This organization, rather than a club that came out of Hull-House, initiated discussions with the settlement about ways to cooperate in a community planning effort. While the West Side Community Organization clearly satisfied the agenda of democratization and had well-developed neighborhood leadership that would become significant for the effort to employ community-based planning for urban renewal when the Near West Side was challenged by large-scale land clearance plans, the organization also promoted a narrow vision of what constituted the neighborhood and ultimately made inter-racial cooperation, in response to the migration of African Americans from the South untenable.

The years of the experiment with community-based planning occurred during the directorship of Russell W. Ballard. With Carr gone, and with her the majority of the residents and staff who sided with her, also departed[26], Hull-House returned to its former traditions, with minor revisions.[27] The trustees regrouped, appointed an interim director, and carefully sought out the next permanent director.[28] The board ignored the community’s demands to have input in the selection of the next Hull-House director.[29] The 25-member trustee board had become more of a policy-generating group; there was much more bureaucracy and officers of the “corporation” now included a president, three vice-presidents, a secretary, a treasurer, and an assistant treasurer. The director was more formally scrutinized by the board and was increasingly treated as a paid employee in the corporate model. Louise Bowen was president and treasurer.[30] 

Russell Ballard, a civil rights advocate who easily fit the Hull-House board’s qualification that the director of Hull-House “defend the rights of all racial, religious and economically disadvantaged groups as Hull-House has done in the past,”[31] succeeded Carr and continued to push for improved race relations in the neighborhood and for greater progress in the integration of the settlement and its programs. His ability to speak out, however, and to initiate programs was hampered by the board’s committee system. The conservative tendencies of the board were strengthened in the cold war anti-communism and red-baiting that accelerated in the post-World War II decades. These trends were apparent during Charlotte Carr’s administration and she, like many pragmatic Left-leaning New Dealers attempted to distance herself from Communist-front groups and the Communist Party.[32]

Additionally, Ballard functioned in an atmosphere of increased racial tension in the United States. For Chicagoans and others in urban centers in the North, the Detroit race riot of 1943 was a frightening example of what might happen locally. Chicago’s Mayor Edward Kelley appointed a Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations [later the Chicago Commission on Human Relations] immediately after the events in Detroit. Ballard and his assistant director, Elaine Switzer, were active in the expanded work on race relations undertaken by the Council of Social Agencies of Chicago.[33]  It was, however, in the day-to-day activities that Ballard, Switzer, and Robert Mulligan were immediately responsible that the work of race relations found its practical expression. “Because people attend a settlement house voluntarily, working with any group in an interracial setting calls for statesmanship of the highest order,” Ballard wrote.[34] Ballard and his staff had to combat the withdrawal of Whites from programs as the neighborhood became increasingly influenced by the rumor that “Hull-House was ‘being ruined by the Mexicans and Negroes.’”[35]

One of the Hull-House staff, Arthur Ferrell, had been stabbed when he was escorting a group of African American boys to their homes after a Hull-House activity. Occurring in 1952, it was the first incident of an attack on a member of the Hull-House staff.  Hull-House trustee Robert R. Taylor, an African American who was president of the Chicago Housing Authority board, encouraged Ballard to deal with the incident through the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations since the commission “had stepped in quietly in other areas at early signs of tension and had been able to help the local agencies work out constructive programs which appeared to allay unrest and lessen the tensions.”  The trustees also urged Ballard to press the police for a thorough investigation.[36]

Two years later, after more than fifty years of ethnic and race segregation, a new formula was tried out with the teams in the gymnasium. Each team was made up of boys from all racial groups in an effort to secure integration of all groups in the neighborhood.  Later reports indicated the progress was slow.[37] Out of frustration with the slow pace of interracial progress, Russell Ballard suggested that Hull-House begin to follow the lead of other settlement houses and extend their work directly into public housing projects where the need for service was so great.[38]

Eri Hulbert was well aware of the racial tensions in the Near West Side long before he agreed to take the staff position of executive director of the Near West Side Planning Board. The Italians did not want the African American community that was south of Roosevelt Road, a major racial boundary, to move into the area they saw as their own turf. The public housing projects were a potential source of racial change in the neighborhood, so while affordable public housing was a reasonable alternative for the blighted housing on the Near West Side, it was an unacceptable solution for the Whites that lived in the neighborhood and were the potential participants in community-based planning.  Attempting to bring together individuals from all sections and elements of the Near West Side community so that a planning board could begin with solid commitment behind it, his past involvement with the Jane Addams Homes in the neighborhood, and Hull-House’s advocacy of public housing, worked against him. Father Barton, parish priest at Holy Family Church, a key institution in the neighborhood, disseminated blatantly hostile stories in his parish newsletter indicting Hulbert and Hull-House for their Left-wing politics and their advocacy of more public housing in the neighborhood. (Barton called it socialized housing.) In 1938 Barton had stopped the CHA from extending the Jane Addams Homes, an effort that Hulbert, as service director of the Homes, and Hull-House, as a willing intermediary for the CHA in the neighborhood, had favored.[39]

Hulbert produced a brochure to introduce the community planning board idea to the neighborhood. It indicates his grasp of the problems involved with creating an organization from scratch; of offering new and relatively technical information to people from all educational backgrounds and viewpoints; of the inherent structural problems of dealing with the new local, federal, and state bureaucracies pertaining to planning; and of the difficult distinction between creating a vehicle for the community to talk out and reconcile its differences over planning, constructing the planning board itself;, and finally, presenting a plan that would be implemented by other private and public partnerships. It was a very big meal for the community to digest.

The brochure tantalizingly explained that the private investors who could receive land from the Land Clearance Commission might be a neighborhood redevelopment corporation, an insurance company, or any individual, association or corporation set up legally to invest in housing in Illinois, including cooperatives and veterans’ groups. In essence, it could be the community itself. The brochure enumerated the funds available for redevelopment from state, federal, and city sources, and concluded: “These laws and this money plus private capital can result in new homes, more parks and schools, better business and industrial facilities on the Near West Side. They offer a unique opportunity for the pioneering of a new frontier in city building.”[40]

In the next seven years, Hulbert and a core group that functioned as an executive committee did a monumental job of getting the concept of community-based planning on the table. Hulbert was able to gain the attention of the public agencies involved in the urban renewal process and while there were no agreements written in stone, all along the way the Near West Side Planning Board felt that it had general approval of its overall direction. [41]  This was an overly optimistic view.[42]

The process of interacting with the agencies was difficult for large-scale developers and, for a semi-professional group, as the Near West Side Planning Board was, having only limited support from local foundations, and a modest allocation annually from the Hull-House Association, the task was formidable.[43] In truth, the Planning Board had put off dealing with the really complicated problem of private capital once a plan was put in place. What made that an even more serious concern was the fact that in reality approval for a plan from the public agencies was based in large part on whether or not it was deemed realistic that the proposed project could be financed. The inability of the Planning Board to collect significant funds from the businesses in the redevelopment area was a sign of its weakness.[44]    

Perhaps the most disconcerting outcome in 1950 of the two years of organizing and after “75 meetings, which had been attended by 248 different people and by a total of 778, exclusive of innumerable small conferences, exclusive of hours of volunteer time  . . . exclusive of meetings called by other agencies in which the Planning Board participated and exclusive of a few Planning Board meetings of which accurate record was not made,”[45] was the realization that most people in the neighborhood were not interested in planning beyond their own block, or even their own piece of property.

The persistence of racism was undoubtedly the central problem in any kind of community planning in an area like the Near West Side. Hulbert and the core group[46] of Hull-House affiliated Planning Board members had to start the planning process in the place in which they found the community. While it was possible to include one or two African Americans, the other major interest group was the Italians. The reality was that the push from the Italian-dominated West Side Community Organization, and the churches in the neighborhood, was to focus on the much smaller area whose population was overwhelmingly Italian.[47]

Eri Hulbert was caught in a dilemma. He wanted to expand the horizons of the neighborhood and educate the people about the opportunities of planning, but he first had to gain their trust. The neighborhood felt that large-scale clearance was about to happen. So much of the neighborhood had become vacant already that this was not an unreasonable worry. Stimulated by this anxiety, a survey of property owners in the area was made with the help of a staff of local people hired and trained for the purpose. The information was to be mapped.

For the first time in two years, Eri Hulbert was energized and although he had pointed out the lack of money, lack of membership, and lack of action, and the persistence of racial tensions, he saw accomplishments: they were organizing the Planning Board itself; they had gotten industry, business, agencies and residents started in working together. Possibly the most important single concrete fact was the changed policy of the Central National Bank toward loans for home repair and home rebuilding.[48] Suddenly, in the face of the threat of losing the neighborhood, there was energy and hope for rehabilitation block by bloc, for conservation in selected blocks, for redevelopment.

Of course, this was putting the cart before the horse. There was no overall plan. How could any homeowner or business owner rely on the information from the various agencies when the City Council had not voted on a comprehensive plan for the city and the metropolitan area?[49]

To meet the insecurity that lurked underneath the frenzied activity to get maps readied and to showcase selected blocks where rehabilitation/conservation had been accomplished, the alderman of the ward introduced an ordinance into the City Council, the Pistilli Ordinance, bearing his name. The ordinance transformed the area bounded by Harrison Street, Halsted Street, Roosevelt Road, and Ashland Avenue from its blighted designation to be reclassified with certain exceptions as a proper area for rehabilitation of existing structures. [This eventually became the site of the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois.] The exceptions were the several blocks within the area where the structures were in such condition that it was economically unsound to undertake rehabilitation.[50]  Hulbert and others on the Near West Side Planning Board had questions about how the Pistilli Ordinance would be implemented and worried about residents of the neighborhood investing in rehabilitation without real guarantees.[51]

More profoundly, the Hull-House trustees and their core supporters on the Near West Side Planning Board believed the motivation for the Pistilli Ordinance was anti-democratic. It was a way to keep out private projects that might allow interracial housing or even African American families to live in public housing along with White families. Ironically, Eri Hulbert found himself engaged in a “democratic” process in the development of the community-based planning board that was, in the final analysis badly flawed.

The Hull-House trustees were reluctant to sponsor or advocate measures that allowed for a kind of local option to impede the civil rights of minorities. [52] This tension between the will of the local people and the values of open housing and anti-discrimination as a non-negotiable part of public policy in the rebuilding of American cities has been the subject of many works in the field of urban history and urban studies. 

By 1953-54, the Hull-House trustees were far less enamored with the possibilities of the Near West Planning Board. Rather than abandon their commitment to community planning, they sought for other ways to cultivate it. After years of involvement with the community, the trustees and staff of Hull-House returned to the drawing board and put together a citizen participation grant that was funded by the Schwarzhaupt Foundation; initially the grant was to be administered through the Near West Side Planning Board but, with the sudden and unexpected death of Eri Hulbert[53], the trustees’ discomfort with elements of the Near West Side Planning Board came to a head. Not being able to find among the Planning Board leadership anyone to replace Hulbert (who the trustees trusted and believed in) they moved to sidestep the group. A reorganized structure for the implementation of money from Schwarzhaupt for the development of citizen participation was accomplished and the Near West Side Planning Board officially severed its relationship with the Hull-House settlement in 1956. The new entity, the Citizen Participation Project, controlled entirely by the Hull-House Association, began anew; after hiring a professional community organizer, a series of community meetings to promote citizen participation were inaugurated![54]  Hull-House’s commitment to community-based planning was to go on, but this time in a more controlled and focused approach.

These developments paralleled the change of direction for the neighborhood that was coming from the outside. In 1954, William Deknatel reported that James W. Follin, U.S. director of slum clearance and urban redevelopment, had been in Chicago during the past week talking with the Near West Side Planning Board, the Chicago Plan Commission and the Chicago Land Clearance Commission. It looked as if a firm commitment would result for the Hull House area to be one of two pilot urban renewal projects in the area when the housing bill now in Congress passed. Deknatel further reported that Mr. Follin was fairly sanguine about the prospects of the bill’s passage.”[55]

In 1956 the Harrison-Halsted area, the 55.5 acre tract of land that became in 1963 the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, was designated an urban renewal area. Reversing the agreements made locally through the City Council [Pistilli Ordinance] regarding the possibility of conservation and rehabilitation, the Chicago Land Clearance Commission now said that the project area was a slum and blighted area and eligible for redevelopment. [56]

Between 1957 and 1961, when it was first learned that the Harrison-Halsted area was being considered as the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, several initiatives for redevelopment were on the table. The site conservation report for Harrison-Halsted could be read two ways: from the point of view of big-picture urban planning, the finding that “most of the structures in the project area and the living units contained in the structures have deteriorated to a degree where rehabilitation or conservation would not be an economic procedure”[57] opened up all kinds of possibilities; from the viewpoint of the local residents who had been the most ardent supporters and participants in the Near West Side Planning Board, and who had been working under the assumption that many of them could rehabilitate their own homes and remain in the neighborhood, it was the beginning of a series of betrayals. There were also property owners in the neighborhood who saw a chance for financial gains as they contemplated the rise in property values that were outside of, but close to the area designated for large-scale redevelopment. But this was possible only if public housing was kept out.

Ultimately, the Hull-House trustees who were increasingly representative of a real-estate industry-led redevelopment of post-World War II metropolitan Chicago (reflecting the Richard J. Daley plan for urban rebirth) found that the role for Hull-House was to help federal, state, and municipal authorities demolish the neighborhood[58] that had been the focus and the context of the settlement experience between 1889 and 1959. James C. Downs, Jr., who served as president of the Hull-House Association in 1959,1960, and 1961, the crucial years in which the fate of the neighborhood was decided, was a downtown realtor who had also made a name for himself as the head of Real Estate Research Corporation, the firm that had done the original site studies for the proposed Chicago-area campus of the University of Illinois. He began his association with Hull-House sometime in the mid-1950s. He had become one of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s closest advisors. The other trustees in 1957-1960 included: the wives of realtors Jay Beidler Camp and Ferd Kramer. (Kramer, who was involved in some capacity in almost every major redevelopment project in Chicago, served as president of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Commission and in 1941 with Holman Pettibone, and Newton Farr, helped guide Chicago’s early renewal efforts. Kramer managed Lake Meadows, a project funded by New York Life, and developed Prairie Shores.) By the end of the 1950s, the Hull-House Trustees were reinventing the settlement by contemplating its removal from its historic site and its transformation into a social agency that served multiple constituencies in locations throughout the metropolitan area. The vision of settling as a bridge-building act undertaken to create cross-class and cross-ethnic and racial harmony and understanding had fallen away, replaced by strategies of delivering services in decentralized settings.

Deknatel, an architect whose widowed father, businessman Frederick Deknatel had become a resident of Hull-House in the 1900s, represented the ambivalent relationship the settlement had for a long time with the neighborhood. Deknatel played an increasingly significant role as a trustee and, finally, as president of the board of trustees of the Hull-House Association. He was intimately involved with the creation of the Temporary Organizing Committee, which became the Near West Side Planning Board. Deknatel was refreshingly transparent in a speech he made to the Hull-House trustees in 1947, as he explained the role that Hull-House would play:

With the beginning of planning there will be a series of battles. There will be inevitably serious disagreements about planning matters, both small and large. . . it will be you at Hull house who will be most capable of arbitrating these differences, because Hull House is the most disinterested agency in this community. It is the most disinterested because if our effort succeeds largely, it will put Hull House out of business, and I think that we can sincerely say that that would be a perfect conclusion to our efforts.[59]

This “disinterestedness” from the neighborhood was inherent from the beginning. From public baths to reformation of the juvenile court system, progressive reformers with deep roots in neighborhood settlements like Hull-House began the process of urban renewal in American cities in the 1890s when they first moved into neighborhoods like the Near West Side. One of the first playgrounds in Chicago was opened under the auspices of the Hull House settlement; it was “built” across the street from the settlement in a space created by the demolition of several slum flats owned by William Kent, a second-generation Chicago entrepreneur whose property holdings included badly maintained buildings in the slums. There is no record where the families moved who had lived in the hovels owned by Kent.[60] The expansion of the Hull-House settlement was an eighteen-year project in which slum buildings were demolished and replaced by the twelve additional structures that together made up the settlement complex. In creating this new neighborhood space that served educational, cultural, and recreational needs for thousands of families, the settlement added positive value to the district. It did not, however, add housing for the neighbors.[61] Nowhere in the process of “slum clearance” and replacement with new buildings that had new functions, did the settlement consult with neighbors.

Deknatel also indicated that Hull-House was not wedded to fighting for a plan that the neighborhood people endorsed but was deemed unacceptable by planning experts, or did not fit with a better, more comprehensive and metropolitan plan. When the possibility of rebuilding the neighborhood by eliminating it and establishing the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois in its place, Deknatel and others on the board of trustees of the settlement could argue that this was an acceptable outcome of urban renewal as the university plan had merit in a larger conceptualization of metropolitan planning and, furthermore, in its “disinterestedness,” the trustees could envision Hull-House Association providing services somewhere else. It was not tied to the neighborhood.

Two points should be made here. The first is that the Near West Side Planning Board, while unsuccessful ultimately, had positive outcomes as well. The Planning Board continued its work after 1955 because the heirs of Eri Hulbert had “bought” the concept of community-based planning. A number of the neighborhood leaders who had cut their teeth on the Planning Board’s activities, were in place to participate in other councils and commissions where places for community representation needed to be filled. The Planning Board continued to include individuals who were Hull-House residents and/or lifelong participants in the settlement. Ernest Giovangelo, his sister Florence Giovangelo Scala, and Jessie Binford were examples of the social citizenship and new social relations Jane Addams had hoped would evolve from the disinterested, neighborly and open-ended role of the settlement. Inspired by the reform spirit associated with Hull-House, Binford came to the settlement as a resident in 1902, from Marshalltown, Iowa. She became involved with the workings of the new system of juvenile justice and movement of prevention of juvenile delinquency and, in her capacity as head of the Juvenile Protective League (a Hull-House affiliate located in the settlement), she became an adviser and advocate for neighborhood families. Troubled by the professionalization of child welfare during the 1940s and the eclipse of the community work approach, Binford retired in 1952 but remained a resident of Hull-House.

In 1961, Binford joined Florence Scala to co-chair the Harrison-Halsted Community group in opposition to the clearance of the neighborhood for the construction of the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois. Binford wanted people to know that it wasn’t the Hull-House settlement that she was trying to save, but the neighborhood itself. [62]

The Giovangelos had grown up in the neighborhood with close ties to Hull-House, even though they also belonged to the Roman Catholic parish. Florence had a talent for acting and made close relationships with Hull-House residents who ran the theater arts department. It was with the Planning Board, however, that Scala fully realized her individual potential and began to understand the potential of democratic participation in social change. “To me,” she explained, [Hulbert] was a teacher and a persistent pioneer in this new idea that the people themselves must participate in the planning of their own communities.[63]

Florence’s brother, Ernest, became a community organizer and participated closely with Hulbert. Some considered Ernie the obvious choice as the new director of the Planning Board after the unexpected death of Hulbert. There were clear biases against Ernie from the settlement side, where it became clear that fear of loss of control of the Planning Board, with the appointment of a real community leader as the executive director, outweighed faith in community-based planning.[64]

Teaching that “the people themselves must participate in the planning of their own communities” was dangerous; by bolstering up the self-confidence of local leaders and supporting the neighborhood’s aspirations, Hull-House created a dilemma of major proportions. And this brings us to the second important point about the post-1955 planning process. Among the trustees of the settlement there was a split over what position to take when concrete proposals began to surface for the Harrison-Halsted site.

When they first heard that the neighborhood was considered as a site for the university, many trustees were shocked and greatly disturbed by the lack of a democratic process in making this proposal. This proposal came from left field; there had been numerous sites for the Chicago branch of the university proposed, vetted, and rejected, and there was still the possibility of a site near the central downtown that required the reorganization of railroad terminals. It had been touted as the best site. The sudden introduction of Harrison-Halsted was shocking since the City’s department of urban renewal, the Chicago Plan Commission, the Chicago Land Clearance Commission, and the Chicago Housing Authority had all had innumerable conversations with the community councils, including the Near West Side Planning Board, that envisioned some kind of project for Harrison-Halsted that combined clearance of slums, rehabilitation and conservation of viable structures, and a staged re-location and then return of displaced neighborhood people into residences they could afford.

Even the Hull-House trustees like James C. Downs, Jr., who were “insiders” in the urban renewal/planning circles of the City, had participated, seemingly in good faith, with the community.[65] As late as January 1960, Downs and the trustees were involved in developing a plan for a new cooperative housing development in the cleared land near Hull-House.[66] There had never been any talk about the possibility of the site as a campus for the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois.

All of this involvement with the community was interrupted when in April of 1960, leaks in local newspapers revealed plans to use the Harrison-Halsted site for a university campus. Confidential meetings were held in Downs’s downtown office with trustees from the settlement. [67] Between April and October of 1960, while James C. Downs, Jr., held the position of president of the Hull-House board of trustees and was a senior advisor to Mayor Richard J. Daley on urban renewal projects and clearly a participant in the inner circles of power surrounding the mayor, Hull-House trustees brooded and debated what position they should take regarding the proposal to build the University of Illinois campus on the Harrison-Halsted site and thereby destroy the residential community with whom the settlement had been engaged in active planning for improvements for more than a decade. Downs, who stepped down from the presidency at the crucial moment of the public announcement of the plan to build the university in the neighborhood, remained an active trustee, as did his son, Anthony.[68] Downs and his son, pushed for the board to remain neutral during the crucial months of negotiations between the City and the University of Illinois over the final resolution of site selection.[69]

In February 1961, pressure from trustees and staff to oppose the University of Illinois campus plan had gathered, as had the opposition from the neighborhood to both the plan and to the lack of leadership from Hull-House. A special committee was appointed from the board; it deliberated and came back with a resolution to oppose the university plan that ended with this statement:

For decades Hull House has been standing for democratic processes and has been endeavoring to teach them to the thousands of new Americans who have passed through its doors. In the tradition of Jane Addams, Hull house cannot stand by while a project is undertaken which, however worthy in itself, completely ignores these processes, and must oppose governmental actions which fail to consider the rights of the people affected.[70]

This resolution never got out of the boardroom; divided, the trustees negotiated their internal differences by continuing a public position of neutrality.[71] Hull-House resident Robert Mulligan despaired at the refusal of the Board to release the statement. He stated to the board that the people feel that part of the ‘greater good’ of the City of Chicago is good democratic government. They say they are not cattle or colonials, but people, and should be treated that way.”[72]

This board stance of taking no position on the proposed Chicago campus of the university was understood by the community as a betrayal of neighborhood interests and of the hard work of community-based planning that they had engaged in because, in part, they trusted Hull-House.  The Hull-House staff, who continued to have close ties with the neighbors (and in many cases sided with the community against the trustees’ neutrality) considered the board, in the best reading of it, indecisive, and in the worst, betrayers and hypocrites.[73]

The settlement had been instrumental in organizing the neighborhood to accept the concept of planning; it had been the agent of change, of modernization, and ironically, the agent of an urban renewal project that destroyed rather than rebuilt the neighborhood. It was not that the neighbors had resisted change; they had played by the rules, worked with City officials and urban renewal agencies. Hull-House, from this point of view, was demonstrating that democracy did not work. On the other hand, the plans that were acceptable to the neighborhood leaders of the Harrison-Halsted area, did not work if your goal was to provide affordable and decent housing for the people who lived just a few blocks south across the race boundary of Roosevelt Road.

This leads to a consideration of whether or not community-based planning is an effective means for solving the problems of urban neighborhoods. The question of the unit of planning is very important. For Anthony Downs and his father, James C., and for William Deknatel and many others on the board of trustees of Hull-House, the neighborhood was not the defining unit. The well-being or common good of the metropolitan area, the more realistic measure for modern planners, required a broader universe of people, institutions, and resources than that which could be addressed in a neighborhood of a city. Were these men the villains of the tale? Initially in my research I found the juxtaposition of the real estate interests on the board of trustees and the self-consciously integrationist positions of Russell Ballard to be inexplicable. Why didn’t they fire him? What was going on? After unearthing the names of key civil rights leaders who were resident or trustee at Hull-House in the late 1930s thru 1950s, at the same time that James C. Downs Jr., and other real estate redevelopment/urban renewal promoters also served on the board, it hit me that this was, in fact, one of the “accomplishments” of cold war liberalism as practiced by Ballard and the trustees at Hull-House. They were more on the same page than one might think. The essence of this liberal coalition was its accommodation to the private market; the integrationists like Ballard had nowhere to go but in the direction of men like Downs and Ferd Kramer of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Commission. He and his wife, who served as a Hull-House trustee, were a new breed of liberals willing to work for managed integration and who advocated private market solutions like Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores in Chicago to reconfigure what had been blighted communities. They did not solve the public housing dilemma, but they created the market for middle-class professionals of both races to have greater choices in the post-World War II housing market. These liberals, who would be awarded human relations commendations from the Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights do not look very much like civil rights leaders to me; yet the other side of the private market, the real estate block-busters and red-lining mortgage agents, were betting on racism to win out.

At Hull-House the race relations specialists, the reformers and idealists, and the liberals who believed in an interracial society inhabited public space in an often polarized, violent urban landscape. Those individuals, idealists like Russell Ballard and Eri Hulbert, who gave their energies to creating vehicles for the development of community leaders and who placed their hopes on the democratic process had to question what went wrong in the Hull-House neighborhood that produced racism rather than tolerance and cloaked this racism in community-based planning processes. This is not to say that all of the participants in the Near West Side Planning Board were opposed to breaking down the color line. That would be a gross overstatement. Yet in the overly narrow focus on a block- by- block approach to conservation and rehabilitation, they selected a small subsection of the Near West Side as their universe. They were aided by federal and state legislation that had built-in local control at crucial stages of redevelopment to satisfy the political forces who fought to keep the racial status-quo. And here again the Hull-House case is instructive. As a settlement house that had a long history of opening its doors to all, it had dealt with the race and ethnic conflicts in the neighborhood by not forcing integration; clubs were self-perpetuating “blocks” in the neighborhood, first because of barriers of languages, but then by the persistent weight of old fashioned prejudices. To counter this, Hull-House had a great variety of programs and activities where there was a mix of the smaller homogeneous groups.

These opportunities for cross-race, cross-ethnic interactions led to friendships and a greater understanding of the importance of respect for all people. Certainly, these experiences made it possible for the neighborhood to value itself and seek a plan to remain a community rather than leave for suburbia. But it also made it possible for old identities to be valorized and for community-based planning to be hampered by the legacy of racism. This paper could only begin to explore the possibilities and limits of community-based planning in an urban neighborhood that encapsulated in its space almost all the fault lines and tensions of American society.  It is a cautionary tale to consider when we assume that “power to the people” can lead to better planning processes than those framed by technocrats and professional planners.

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[1] The trustees demonstrated ambivalence on this issue. On the one hand, although there had been discussions at different times from the 1930s regarding the future of the settlement house, the records of the Hull-House Association make it clear that investment in the old buildings and efforts to develop new programs and to adapt to the changing demography of the area continued unabated until the decision to clear 55 acres of land, including the land in which the thirteen Hull-House buildings stood to make way for construction of the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois, had been made by the University and the City of Chicago. On the other hand, influential board leaders like William Deknatel and James C. Downs, Jr., did not identify Hull-House with the neighborhood.

[2] We need to separate the settlement from its founder, the legendary American heroine, Jane Addams, who is depicted as the quintessential social philosopher of democracy by many recent scholars. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams And the Dream of American Democracy. Basic Books, 2002; Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. The University of Chicago Press, 1996; Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[3] Addams, the daughter of an Illinois State Senator and businessman who died in 1881, inherited a portion of his estate and was able to restore the old Hull home’s interior and contribute to the settlement budget, albeit with contributions from others, until about 1895. Addams was clearly a privileged woman who did not need to work; she was not, however, rich, as attested to the small amount of property and outright cash she had at the time of her death.                                                 

[4] The one exception to this is the relationship she had with Helen Culver; the incorporation of Hull-House in 1895 was a condition imposed by Culver before she would make a permanent relationship with Addams who, from 1889, had leased the house and had negotiated for each new lot for the expansion of the complex. Allen B. Pond to Helen Culver, April 18, 1906. JAMC Reel 4-1331, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.  See also: Jane Addams Memorial Collection correspondence, 1889, reel 2.  Letters to landlord Helen Culver from Jane Addams in March 1890.  Through the early years Addams struggles to get Culver to donate rent and eventually more buildings, finally convincing her after several years to offer some of the lots on the block for sale.  See especially letter from Jane Addams to “Dearest” (Mary Rozet Smith) March 23, 1898, JAMC reel 2.

[5] There were always critics, but Addams did not experience serious and sustained criticism until her pacifism during World War I. This was a difficult period for her personally but in an extraordinary demonstration of loyalty, Louise deKoven Bowen, a pro-war Progressive, stood by Addams and continued to fund the settlement as well as raise money from others, defending her friend and colleague at every turn. Louise deKoven Bowen, “Letter About Hull House,” in volume 2 of Speeches, Addresses, and Letters of Louise deKoven Bowen, ed. Mary Humphreys (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, 1937): 789-92.See Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. (Chicago: Ivan Dees, 2000), pp. 251-281, for a discussion of the attacks on Addams.

[6] Adena Miller Rich is the exception that proves the pattern. As the immediate successor to Addams, this Hull-House resident who headed the Immigrants’ Protective League, an affiliated agency at the settlement that had a national reputation in the field, Rich reluctantly agreed to takeover after Addams’s death, but insisted that she be a part-time, unpaid head resident The Welfare Council of Chicago urged the trustees to find a full-time paid professional as this was becoming the trend in settlements. Charlotte Carr and Russell Ballard called themselves directors and received executive salaries. HHA Minutes of Special Meeting of Trustees, August 2, 1935; HHA Minutes, Jan 8, 1937, HHA Box 1, Folder 5; 

[7] For example, no one dared suggest that Professor Robert Morss Lovett, of the University of Chicago,t and his wife, Ida, leave Hull-House, where they had resided for many years, when the American Legion accused him of disloyalty. Trolander, Settlement Houses and the Great Depression, 104-105.

[8] Alex Elson Oral Interview transcript, OH-074 [interviewed by Stuart J. Hecht] October 12, 1980, 13, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[9] The Hull homestead was the building where Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr opened the settlement house in 1889. For a good biography of Helen Culver see: Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, editors, Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 20010.

[10] See the biographical entry of Wilmarth in Women Building Chicago. Wilmarth, among other distinctions, was the mother-in-law of Harold Ickes, a young Chicago lawyer who later went to Washington D.C.

[11] This data has been gathered primarily from the Minutes of the Hull-House Association, the Hull-House Year Books and Bulletins: April 25, 1895, March 14, 1903; April 14, 1903; October 15, 1907; January 27, 1908; April 14, 1908: October 30, 1928; November 1, 1928; April 9, 1929; June 18, 1929; October 29, 1929;  April 29, 1930;May 27, 1935, Board of Trustees’ Minutes, Hull-House  Collection, Dept. of Spec. Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Hull-House Bulletin 3, no. 12 (November and December 1899): 4. Biographical information on Sewell Avery: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; for Helen Bowen Blair: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; “Helen Culver Funeral To Be Held Saturday.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 20, 1925, pg. 10; “Helen Culver Leaves U. of C. $600,000.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 14, 1925, pg. 1; “C.L. Hutchinson, Banker, Is Dead. Long Active in Civics, Art, and Charities.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 8, 1924. pg. 1. See biographies of Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, Louise deKoven Bowen and Helen Culver in Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[12] Residency was a major function of the settlement house movement. It was a program that socialized hundreds of women and men from privileged and educated backgrounds and promoted ideas that we now associate with the liberal welfare state. Hull-house records on residency are incomplete, but minimally, there were 350 residents by 1930. My own research of residency at Hull-House from 1889 to 1963 lists more than 750 names, with varying amounts of biographical information. In 1935 there were 65 residents, of whom 45 were women and 20 were men, two were children; thirteen had arrived that fall; in 1943 there were 86 adults and 7 children; in 1946 there were 102 adults and 8 children. Hull-House Residents 1889-1929, Hull-House Collection, folder 294, Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC; Hull-House Year Book Forty-Fifth Year, 1934; “Report to Hull-House Trustees,” November 27, 1935, Adena Miller Rich Papers, Folder 17, Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC; Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[13] [Residents of Hull-House] Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together With Comments and Essays On Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions [HHM&P] (New York and Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1895); Mary Jo Deegan argues that the Chicago School of Sociology at the University of Chicago in its early days was influenced by the work undertaken at Hull-House and that the early men of the Chicago school  had the “same ideal, to bring sociological knowledge to everyday life to enable people to make intelligent decisions. . . .”  Deegan, Jane Addams and The Men of the Chicago School, 41. Hull-House residents continued to use the settlement neighborhood as a field of study: Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. and Edith Abbott.  “Chicago Housing Conditions: The West Side Revisited.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 17, no. 1 (July 1911): 1-34. Hull-House residents along with Jane Addams inspired the establishment of the City Homes Association in Chicago which sponsored research, again using the neighborhood and other districts of Chicago, and published Robert. Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chicago. City Homes Association, 1901. At the time Hunter, who continued his career in New York City, was a Hull-House resident. Hull-House resident Edith Abbott revisited the neighborhood and other districts in Chicago in Abbott, Edith. The Tenements of Chicago: 1908-1935. University of Chicago Press, 1936. Recent sociological studies refer to both the neighborhood and the literature that has emerged about it: Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. University of Chicago Press, 1973, 1968.

Hunter, Albert.  Symbolic Communities: The Persistence and Change of Chicago’s Local Communities. University of Chicago Press, 1974; Gregory D. Squires, Larry Bennett, Kathleen McCourt, and Philip Nyden.  Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline. Temple University Press, 1987; Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. Columbia University Press, 1993.

[14] Dorothy Height, Open Wide The Freedom Gates (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2003) 54.

[15] Hull-House Year Book, 1925, 23: “In recent years there has been a rather large influx of colored people into the neighborhood. While this club is relatively new it has made an excellent beginning. Its program includes sewing, cooking, wax-work and recreational activities.” Italians made up twenty-six percent of the Near West Side population while African Americans represented eight percent of the population in 1930. Louis Wirth and Margaret Furez, eds. “Near West Side,” Local Community Fact Book 1938 (Chicago: Chicago Recreation Commission, 1938.

[16] Hull-House Year Book, Fortieth Year, 1930, 27; Hull-House Year Book, Forty-second Year, 44; Donna Hodgman, “Hull-House Community Club Believes in Work As Well As Play.” HH Block News, vol. 2, No. 9, Feb. 10, 1939, 2-3.

[17] Articles in the Chicago Defender about the club never identify its being all black as a problem and there were also reports that when national associations of African American women held their meetings in Chicago, the Hull-House settlement was a sought-after venue for part or all of the programs. This brings up the whole question of how in a segregated society a White institution like Hull-House could promote respect and acceptance of a black-only group; in this case anti-discrimination meant being willing to let African American community groups share space with Whites.

[18] Hull-House Year Book Forty-Second Year, 1931-32, 43; : “One afternoon a month all of the women who have afternoon classes at the House and in periods of unemployment the men as well, have an afternoon social at which refreshments are served and a special program is carried out. The last celebration of Washington’s birthday was especially successful both for its historical presentation and its air of jollity. The group of women represented Mexicans, Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, Germans and Lithuanians.” (Hull-House Year Book, Fortieth Year, 1930, 27; Hull-House Year Book, Forty-fifth year, 44, 35; Donna Hodgman, “Wide Interest Shown In Revival of Greek Club,” Hull-House Block News, Jan. 27, 1939, Vol II, no. 7, 2; HHA Records, Scrapbooks-Press Clippings, Folder 523, West Side Times, 9-13-51;

[19] Harold Ickes, a Chicagoan with close ties to Hull-House and Jane Addams, had served as president of the local chapter of the NAACP. The Left-leaning New Deal networks had begun to include the black bourgeoisie; Hull-House was one of the connecting links in this new infrastructure, bringing blacks and whites together. Later on Robert E. Weaver, who also worked with Ickes, would live at Hull-House while he served as director of Community Services of the American Council on Race Relations in Chicago. Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[20] David W. Kellum, “Death Claims Dewey R. Jones; Journalist is Buried After Simple Rites; Loses Fight With Death After Illness of Nine Days,” Chicago Defender, April 15, 1939, 1.

[21] Hull-House At the Fiftieth Year. May 1940.

[22] http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/urbanexp/main.cgi?file=new/subsub_index.ptt&chap=130. This is an article written by Alexander Gourse for Urban Experience: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods 1889-1963, an educational and research website edited by Rima Lunin Schultz for the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[23] Actually had a surplus, but still were faced with essential repairs; endowment was somewhat over $500,000; during 1943 they did not liquidate any endowment securities for current expenses. The increase in the value of the endowment fund came from higher market quotations for their railroad bonds and common stocks not because there were additions to the endowment in 1943. “Financial Statement Year Ended December 31, 1943,”HHA Trustees’ Annual Meeting, January 28, 1944, Hull House Collection.

[24] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.” Chicago Daily News, Dec. 23, 1942, 1; 4, Folder 543, Hull House Collection, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[25] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.” Chicago Daily News, Dec. 23, 1942, loc. cit.

[26] Some of the break-up of the New Deal group at Hull-House can be attributed to the loss of WPA funds as the New Deal came to an end.

[27] One of the most telling reversals was the return of the weaving room. Carr had taken a real dislike to the arts and crafts-type approach to workers in the neighborhood and had removed much of the Labor Museum arts and crafts and utilized the space for industrial skills training and meeting rooms for groups of men who were unemployed. The weaving room after her departure was revitalized. Esther Wendel Oral Interview Transcript [interviewed by Mary Ann Johnson], July 11, 1984, page 2., Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[28] “Mrs. Ruth Camp To Act As Head of Hull House.” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1943, pg. 18; HHA Trustees’ Minutes, July 23, 1943, Hull House Collection; Council of Social Agencies report by Lucy P. Carner, sec. of Division on Education and Recreation, reported on Hull House June 16, 1943, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[29] Hazel MacDonald, “Residents Ask for a Voice in Hull House,” Chicago Times, n.d., Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 30, Folder 410.

[30] HHA Annual Meeting Minutes, March 26, 1943, Hull House Collection.

[31] This is from a statement of qualifications for the director of Hull-House, which was written by Dr. Wayne McMillen in 1943 for the personnel committee. McMillen was a University of Chicago sociologist who had become a trustee in 1939 on the suggestion of Charlotte Carr. HHA Trustees’ Special Meeting, March 27, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC; HHA Trustees’ Meeting, September 22, 1939.

[32] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.” Chicago Daily News, Dec. 23, 1942, 1; 4, Folder 543, Hull House Collection; “Jane Addams Spirit in Carr Background.” American, December 26, 1942, Folder 543, Hull House Collection

[33] A Brief History of the Committee on Minority Group Relationships, Division of Education and Recreation, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago.” October 1950, 1, Welfare Council Papers, Box 145, Folder 13, Chicago Historical Museum; HHA Trustees’ Minutes, September 24, 1943, Hull House Collection;

[34] Russell W. Ballard, “Hull-House Association Community Fund Service Report,” October 1951, Hull House Collection, Folder 10.)

[35] Russell W. Ballard, “Hull-House Association Community Fund Service Report,” October 1951, Hull House Collection, Folder 10.

[36]  HHA Trustee’ Minutes, March 28, 1952, Hull House Collection, Folder 16; Russell W. Ballard, Hull-House Association Service Report, October 1952. Prepared for the Welfare Council and Community Fund, Folder 41, Hull House Collection.

[37] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, January 28, 1955, page 2 of Minutes, Hull House Collection.

[38] Russell W. Ballard, “The Director’s Report,” January 1957,” Hull House Collection, Folder 21.

[39] HHA Trustee’ Meeting, May 27, 1938, Folder 5, Hull House Collection; Eri Hulbert to William Deknatel, Feb. 21, 1949, Hull House Collection, Folder 383.

[40] “Who Will Plan to Rebuild the Near West Side?” [brochure], n.d. [October 1948] Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 30. Folder 403.

[41] Near West Side Planning Board Meeting with Chicago Land Clearance Commission, November 22, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee, Box 41, Folder 564, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC; Executive Committee Meeting, Near West Side Planning Board, April 20, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, Folder 565; William Deknatel, “The Near West Side Planning Board,” pg. 6, typescript, December 18, 1950, Folder 388, Hull House Collection. Note that in this typescript Deknatel writes: “It was [also] realized at once that there were numerous city agencies whose planning in broad aspects affects the future of the Near West Side in detailed application. [the Plan Commission, the Land Clearance Commission, the Chicago Housing Authority, the Department of Subways and Superhighways] It was important to establish working relationships with the city agencies, with a dual purpose: the first to learn from them, and in turn to inform the people, what plans they are making which affect the community; and the other to transmit to the city agencies an expression of needs developed through the Planning Board.” Also see: Eri Hulbert, executive director, to Ira Bach, Chicago Land Clearance Commission, June 6, 1951, Folder 389, Hull House Collection; Frederick T. Aschman, Chicago Plan Commission, to Ira J. Bach, Executive Director, Chicago Land Clearance Commission, January 11, 1954, Folder 395, Hull House Collection.

[42] Frederick T. Aschman, Chicago Plan Commission, to Ira J. Bach, Executive Director, Chicago Land Clearance Commission, January 11, 1954, Folder 395, Hull House Collection. 

[43] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, Sept. 26, 1952, Hull House Collection, Folder 16; Minutes, HHA trustees’ minutes, January 25, 1952, Hull House Collection, Folder 16; HHA  trustees’ minutes, December 3, 1954, Folder 18

[44] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, December 3, 1954, Folder 18, Hull House Collection; Near West Side Planning Board Meeting with Chicago Land Clearance Commission, November 22, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee, Box 41, Folder 564.

[45] Council Meeting, near West Side Planning Board, May 2, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, Folder 566, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[46] In 1948 six subcommittees were authorized by the Temporary Organizing Committee for the redevelopment of the Near West Side, the precursor of the Near West Side Planning Board. They were: 1. Sub-Committee on Purpose, Policy and By-laws chaired by Russell Ballard and its members included Russell’s son John; HH residents Ruth Austin, Robert Mack, Helen Springer and Clara Stahl. Also HH resident and executive director of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, Thomas Wright. Two “outsiders” were Fred Rosenberg, who was from the West Side Community Organization, and Ethel Clark, who was from the Newberry Center, a social settlement in the African American district south of Hull-House.  The second sub-committee, On Industrial Contacts, was chaired by HH trustee Wallace Flower, a downtown investment banker, and had on its committee HH trustees Edward Blair, J. Biedler Camp and Bernard Schaar [all were either downtown or neighborhood-based businessmen]; Anthony Sorrentino was from the West Side Community Organization, but had grown up as the son of immigrants in the neighborhood; however, was employed by CAP after becoming a sociologist and graduating from U of Chicago. The other member was Walter Van Bergen.  The sub-committee on mailings and records [a fancy name for secretarial???] was, unsurprisingly, composed of three women, with Florence Scala, who had roots in both the neighborhood and Hull-House. The other two women, Rosemary Horn and Constance Varelis were residents at Hull-House. The fourth sub-committee, on Studies in the Area, was chaired by William Jones, professional social worker and African American; the other members were Russell Ballard’s wife, Katherine; Ernest Giovangelo, brother of Florence Scala. HH resident Mary Gleason and a Pauline Lewis, who lived in the neighborhood were the other members. The fifth sub-committee, on materials, was chaired by Nick Taccio, one of the leaders of the West Side Community Organization and had on it the other members were Russell Ballard’s wife, Katherine; and Eleanor Wright, HH resident Thomas Wright’s wife. The sixth sub-committee, on Personnel, was chaired by Joseph Rovai, community leader; HH resident Jessie Binford; HH resident-staff & community person Frances Molinaro; Frank Gabit; Frank Paz, a leader of the Mexican community with long ties to Hull-House; William Ray and Lucy Solano. Of the entire group, the majority were Hull-House connected; the second group related to the West Side Community Organization, and most of them were Italians. “Temporary Organizing Committee for the Redevelopment of the Near West Side,” typed list, n.d. Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 30, Folder 403, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[47] Even after public meetings and major efforts to bring in other groups, the elected council of the Near West Side Planning Board was not very different from the core group at the start of the process.

[48] Council meeting minutes, Near West Side Planning Board, Inc., November 8, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 41, Folder 564, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[49] Declaration of Housing Policy for rehabilitation of An Area of the Near West Side, Nov. 18, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 41, Folder 564, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[50] Special meeting of the Planning Committee of the near West Side Planning Board, March 9, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, File 565, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[51] Executive Committee Meeting, Near West Side Planning Board, April 20, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, Folder 565, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[52] William F. Deknatel letter to Senator Robert McClory, Springfield, Illinois, April 16, 1953, Folder 41, Hull House Collection.

[53] I could find no evidence of the cause of death. I don’t have evidence of suicide, either, but in cases where letters, obituaries, memorial tributes, etc., absolutely are silent about cause or illness, accident or sudden hospitalization, it is not too remote a thought that this sensitive, overworked, incredibly idealistic, and very disappointed man would have taken his own life. “Eri Hulbert.” Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1955, pg. C10; See the Memorial Brochure in the Eri Baker Hulbert, III Papers, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[54] Minutes, HHA Trustees’ Minutes, December 3, 1954, Folder 18; Minutes, HHA board of trustees, April 29, 1955, Hull House Collection, Folder 19; Staff Chicago Land Clearance Commission, Site Designation Report for Slum and Blighted Area Redevelopment Project Harrison-Halsted,” September 12, 1956, pg. 3, Folder 394, Hull House Collection UIC; Minutes, HHA Board of trustees, October 26, 1956, Hull House Collection, Folder 20; Schwarzhaupt Committee Meeting Minutes, Dec. 19, 1956, Folder 392, Hull House Collection UIC; Bernard E. Schaar, “Comment on the Objectives of Schwarzhaupt Project,” January [7], 1957, Folder 392, Hull House Collection, UIC.

[55] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, April 30, 1954, Hull House Collection, Folder 18.

[56] Staff Chicago Land Clearance Commission, Site Designation Report for Slum and Blighted Area Redevelopment Project Harrison-Halsted,” September 12, 1956, pg. 3, Folder 394, Hull House Collection UIC.

[57] Staff Chicago Land Clearance Commission, Site Designation Report for Slum and Blighted Area Redevelopment Project Harrison-Halsted,” September 12, 1956, pg. 3, Folder 394, Hull House Collection UIC.

[58] “Hull House Eases Urban Renewal Fear.” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1958, pg. E4

[59] William Deknatel, untitled typed manuscript, n.d., pg. 2. Hull House Collection, Folder 386, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[60] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 168-169

[61]  The Jane Club had rooms for thirty young women. Helen Campbell, “The Jane Club and its Meaning.” The Interior (September 17, 1903).

[62] Florence Scala and Jessie Binford to Mrs. Emmett Dedmon, Paul Jans, HH Board of Trustees, March 27, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 27, Spec. Col., Daley Library, UIC; Jessie Binford to Mr. Jans, Marshalltown, Iowa, June 12, 1964, Folder 297, Hull House Collection.

[63] Remarks by Florence Giovangelo Scala, loc. cit.

[64] Minutes, HHA board of trustees, April 29, 1955, Hull House Collection, Folder 19 make it clear, even before Hulbert’s death, that the citizen participation aspect of the Planning Board was troublesome and needed intervention by professionals; a committee to supervise the original Schwarzhaupt grant for citizen participation was created so that Hull-House had control.

[65] Erwin Bach, “Push For U.S. Urban Aid in W. Side Area. Defense Mapped By Leaders.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 13, 1957, W1; Minutes, HHA board of trustees, September 26, 1957, Hull House Collection, Folder 22;

[66] William F. Deknatel to James C. Downs, Jr., January 6, 1960, Folder 49, Hull House Collection.

[67] Minutes, HHA board of trustees, April 28, 1960, Folder 49, Hull House Collection.

[68] James C. Downs, Jr., to Mrs. Claire Dedmon, Secretary, February 10, 1961, Hull House Collection, folder 25; Minutes, Special Meeting HHA trustees, Feb. 13, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25; Minutes, HHA trustees, February 23, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25;

[69] “The answer of Hull-House to all inquiries about the position in this matter will be that so far the idea is only a proposal; and that when it becomes a definite plan the Hull-House board will take action and make its position known.”  Minutes, HHA board of trustees, Sept. 29, 1960, Hull House Collection, Folder 24.

[70] Resolution Prepared by the Committee of the HHA Board of Trustees, February 10, 1961, Eri Baker Hulbert III Papers, Box 1, Folder 45.

[71] There were some trustees who opposed the “process” but thought the university plan a good one; others felt an obligation or responsibility to side with the neighbors; others wanted to salvage parts of the 13-building complex and hoped for leverage in negotiating with the university, should it be built, for inclusion of these buildings and also social work programs. These last mentioned trustees worried that taking a stance against the university prematurely would weaken Hull-House’s ability to negotiate.

[72] Minutes, HHA trustees, February 23, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25.

[73] Minutes, HHA trustees, February 23, 1961, loc. cit.

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 [RS1]This has to be corrected

 [RS2]Now know the connection.

 [RS3]