30 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS as a home, the office of a factory, a second-hand fnmitore store, and a home for the aged. In addition to this its attic was supposed to be hannted. In spite of its varied career the house was still in good condition and was soon repaired. Miss Helen Culver, the owner of the house, gave, on the following spring, a free leasehold of the entire building. The thirteen buildings now under the management of Hull House stand on property which is almost entirely the gift of this generous woman.
- * To provide a center for a higher civic and social life ; to
institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enter- prises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago": This, says their charter, is the object of Hull House. But it is more intensely human than this cold statement indicates. It was also the intention of Hull House to enter into the lives of the poor and the ig- norant and to keep alive that spark of humanity which all too often becomes sodden under the ceaseless dropping of poverty. Accordingly, Hull House was furnished as the residents would have furnished their own homes in any other part of the city. Perhaps a knowledge of the neighborhood of Hull House will make evident the high audacity of this. On one side was a colony of some ten thousand Italians ; to the south were as many Germans, with Polish and Russian Jews occu- pying the side streets; further south was a vast Bohemian colony; to the northwest were many Canadian French; and to the north was an Irish colony. Thus Hull House was in the midst of six nations. The conditions of the neighborhood may be understood from a single incident. When, aroused by the inactivity of the garbage inspector. Miss Addams as a last resort entered a bid for the contract to remove the garbage from her ward, her bid was thrown out on technicalities. The incident resulted, however, in her appointment as garbage in- spector of the nineteenth ward. It was no light task for an already busy woman, but with the help of fellow-residents re- sults began to appear. As a crowning achievement, a pave- ment was discovered eighteen inches underground in a nar- row street which no one remembered ever to have been paved.
