Making the West Side: Community Conversations on Neighborhood Change” was a multi-year initiative, envisioned by the former director and chief curator Jennifer Scott, that used humanities to catalyze needed public discussions about neighborhood history and change on Chicago’s rapidly gentrifying West Side.
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (JAHHM), located at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), worked with humanities scholars and cultural partners to use the 128 years-long legacy of the Hull-House Settlement on the West Side of Chicago and recent humanities scholarship as a starting point and grounding for important community conversations, public programs and exhibitions. The Museum convened a day-long public forum, hosted dozens of gathering with scholars and community groups over several years, organized ten community conversations at partner cultural sites, and developed this website, all focused on West Side historical development and present-day change.
JAHHM also produced several exhibitions that leveraged community connections and history on the West Side of Chicago. In the wake of a renewed effort to close schools on the West and South sides of Chicago, JAHHM opened Claiming Space: Creative Grounds and Freedom Summer School(2017) and Claiming Space: Nicole Marroquin(2017)—collaborative exhibitions with artists, educators and students that explored the transformation of public school spaces amidst the backdrop of depopulation, divestment and school closures. In 2018, Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination sparked outrage on Chicago’s West Side, JAHHM revisited artists at the center of neighborhood change. The Best Side: The Art and Soul of Jackie Hetherington(2018) featured works of a local, West Side artist who—just seven months after the 1968 uprising—co-founded Art and Soul, a unique neighborhood center located in two storefronts in Chiago’s North Lawndale neighborhood.
Making the West Side in the News
‘Making the West Side’ DigsDeep Into History of Museum’s Backyard: Former JAHHM Director & Chief Curator Jennifer Scott talks with WBEZ’s. Morning Shift about a multi-year program with lectures, exhibitions, public discussions and performances.
The Barbara Shop Show: ‘Making the West Side’: Former JAHHM Director & Chief Curator Jennifer Scott is joined in conversation by West Side Chicago changemakers to address the past, present, and future of The Best Side.
Humanities for All: ‘Making the West Side’: Former JAHHM Director& Chief Curator Jennifer Scott was invited by The National Humanities Alliance to write about how Making the West Side uses local history to facilitate conversations about neighborhood change on Chicago’s West Side.
About Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the Near West Side of Chicago
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (JAHHM) JAHHM serves as a dynamic memorial to social reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and her colleagues whose work changed the lives of their immigrant neighbors as well as national and international public policy. The Museum preserves and develops the original Hull-House settlement site for the interpretation and continuation of the historic settlement house vision, linking research, education, and social engagement. JAHHM serves as a social justice center for both the University of Illinois Chicago and the surrounding communities. To learn more about Hull-House settlement, Jane Addams, or book an educator-led tour visit hullhousemusuem.org.
One of the first projects the residents of Hull-House undertook was a comprehensive survey and mapping project of the Hull-House neighborhood called Hull-House Maps and Papers. The 1893 study included color-coded maps outlining the ethnicities and family wages of the neighborhood residents, as well as several essays that spoke directly to the conditions of different ethnic groups living on the West Side. This text would become foundational in the emerging discipline of sociology. It was unique, in that, it was a group of self-trained women who analyzed and published the data. Additionally, it inspired subsequent studies, including W.E.B. DuBois’ sociological investigation of Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Negro (1899).
The mixed legacy of Maps and Papersis at the heart of the questions that are raised by Making the West Side: Community Conversations on Neighborhood Change. Hull-House reformers embarked upon a census and mapping project that helped to define the Near West Side of Chicago in the 1890s geographically, intellectually, and psychologically, and then used this data to address these issues in the programs at the Hull-House settlement.
What is at the heart of neighborhood identity, and how does neighborhood identity form? What are the possibilities and limitations of using data as a central component for understanding neighborhood and social change? How do neighborhoods, institutions, and communities grapple with this change? How can the humanities and history, in particular, deepen our understandings and contemporary conversations around social and neighborhood change and humanize social scientific data?
