Without the actual Hull building, "Hull-House" and all the accomplishments that the name embodies would not exist. When a young resident was asked to give a day in the life at Hull-House, she began with a physical description of the house itself, showing the importance of the building itself. Alice Hamilton responded delightly to Hull-House's "long drawing room, carved white marble mantelpieces, and lofty ceilings" (Jackson,154). The house also known for its "wooden pillars of exceptionally pure Corinthian design...boasting an architectural pedigree recognizable to a trained eye" (Jackson,154). The settlement came to include the entire city block, filling nearly every corner of Halsted, encompassing an art museum and a gym. Hull-House represented a paradox while it sought to live "in" the slums of Chicago but was visually "out" of place.



    The end of Hull-House came with the destruction of its buildings. When the Univesity of Illinois was looking for space to expand, it sought the land Hull-House occupied. The fight was intense, going all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court. In the 1960's, the Richard Daley administration equated urban renewal with urban destruction. Hull-House is now just a re-creation. In an attempt to "keep it alive," exact measurements were taken and a replica was built. But an empty shell remains, soley for the purpose of honoring a memory. Even though many Hull-House programs remain, the uniqueness of sheltering together in a home is gone.

Social Infrastructure

    The buildings contained carefully planned programs. The people of Hull-House needed structuring and restructuring too. The programs composed were organized in a top down method based on research. Varying ethnic clubs were created based on the neighboring ethnic composition. Hull-House met with varying success depending on cultural expectations. Criticism has been levied toward the fact that Hull-House leadership roles were allocated to white middle-class people not to the surrounding neighbors (Stebner,24). For all of its socialist leanings, blacks were not always warmly welcomed at Hull-House, whose presence some felt would discourage other ethnic groups from coming.

    Hull-House, ultimately, was not an immigrant institution in that it represented a pluralistic cultural view of society. Hull-House sought to assimilate individual newcomers into the American way.