Picture the home of America's most famous experiment in social reform. In 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr moved into this old mansion, then surrounded by crowded immigrant tenements, and opened Hull House as a settlement, a place where the educated would live among the poor and work alongside them. It grew into a complex of buildings offering a kindergarten, night classes, a public kitchen, an art gallery, and the city's first public playground.
From here Addams campaigned for child-labor laws, women's suffrage, and the eight-hour day, work that won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, the first American woman to receive it. Most of the complex was demolished for the University of Illinois campus, but this original house survives as a museum. Step up to the porch and imagine a neighborhood of new arrivals from Italy, Greece, and Russia gathering at this door.