(pensive piano music) - [Narrator] At the turn of the century, a young woman named Hilda Satt walked through the front door of Hull House.

- She was a Polish Jewish immigrant, and was really fleeing Russian persecution and looking for work in Chicago.

- [Narrator] Hilda was one of thousands of immigrants from Italy, Russia, Bohemia, and Germany, who found refuge and support at the settlement house.

- [Ross] When Ellen Gates Starr and Jane Addams first moved into this building, they were kind of a curiosity.

The front door actually became a really important place 'cause people were knocking at it all the time wondering what was happening.

- [Narrator] At a time when there were few services for immigrants, visitors like Hilda encountered much more than a house.

- Eventually, the complex grew from just this one mansion to 13 buildings total.

- [Narrator] Hull House founder Jane Addams didn't just want the settlement house to offer charity to the community.

She wanted it to become part of the community.

- She wanted it to be a space where people felt welcome to come, spend a lot of time there, interact with it.

- [Narrator] A young woman like Hilda would have had plenty to interact with.

In addition to English and citizenship classes, art was a core part of the Hull House philosophy.

They offered classes in music, painting, sculpting, and drawing.

- Hull House was at the intersection of a lot of different communities.

There wasn't language that people had in common and it really isolated the communities, so there wasn't much interaction between them.

Ellen Gates Starr and Jane Addams saw art as a universal language, and a means of creative expression and release for the people living here.

- [Narrator] Addams opened the first free public art gallery at Hull House, the Butler Art Gallery.

- They actually ran a lending library out of that gallery that was kind of centered around lending art to schools and to organizations in the community to give people access to the arts in a free way.

And so they would like check it out like a book and then return it after a while.

- [Narrator] There was also a theater, which became a safe space for political activism, such as union organizing.

Hilda knew firsthand the risks of openly supporting unions.

At one event, she spoke about the unfair working conditions she experienced at a textile factory as a teenager.

She was fired the next day.

But going to a play at Hull House might look less suspicious.

- [Ross] They also might find there that there's pamphlets about union organizing, or they might hear from somebody who might tell them a little about organizing, maybe at an intermission.

So there was ways to kind of tell people about the organizing under the cover of entertainment for the neighborhood.

- [Narrator] At the Hull House Labor Museum, immigrant workers shared their heritage by teaching embroidery, weaving, metalwork, and pottery.

It allowed immigrant children to connect with their parents, but it served another purpose too.

- In Jane Addams' account of this, she really hoped that American-born women would walk past the windows of the Labor Museum and see immigrant women doing a similar textile practice that the American women would do in their own home, and those American women would find a connection.

- [Narrator] There was also plenty of fun to be had at Hull House.

There were social clubs, a gym, a daycare, and the city's first public playground.

- Hull House was really dedicated to the construction of it because they believed that having safe and collected spaces for children to play in would help them be safer in the community and create sort of a space where children could just be themselves.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Hilda spent nearly every evening at Hull House for 10 years.

In her autobiography, she recounts how Jane Addams and the women of Hull House changed her life.

- They were trying to ameliorate the issues in the neighborhood.

They were trying to work directly with the people that lived there.

This wasn't a charity.

It was a way to work together to provide access to practical, democratic goods, and the people that showed up at the front door could participate in that.

(gentle music concludes)