Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House in Chicago, the first settlement house in the United States.
In September 1889, Jane Addams, together with her college friend Ellen Gates Starr, opened Hull-House in a decaying mansion on Chicago's Near West Side. This settlement house—modeled loosely on London's Toynbee Hall, which Addams had visited on a trip to Europe—became the first settlement house in the United States, a residence where educated, middle-class reformers lived among impoverished immigrant communities to provide social, educational, and cultural services.
Hull-House rapidly grew to encompass dozens of buildings offering kindergarten and childcare, adult education classes, an art gallery, a public kitchen, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a coffeehouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and employment and legal aid bureaus for the largely immigrant, working-class neighborhood surrounding it. It became a laboratory for social reform, drawing prominent visitors, reformers, and future leaders in social work, sociology, and public policy.
The founding of Hull-House is widely regarded as the birth of the American settlement house movement, which eventually included hundreds of similar institutions across the country. It also laid crucial institutional groundwork for the emerging profession of social work. The house's efforts on behalf of labor rights, public health, sanitation, and immigrant welfare directly influenced local and national legislation. Addams's leadership of Hull-House launched her into a decades-long career as one of America's most influential reformers.