The untimely death of Jane Addams' Hull House Association

We were struck Thursday by how comparatively little attention greeted the announced death of the Jane Addams Hull House Association.

Many of us in the suburbs, of course, are a bit removed from the work of Hull House, an agency whose focus since its inception has been on the neighborhoods of Chicago even though its reach officially extends further into the metropolitan area.

But all of us who live in the Chicago area have been touched nonetheless, in ways not always perceived, by the storied history of Hull House, the selfless philanthropy, groundbreaking social work and engaged reform efforts of its founder, Jane Addams.

Hundreds of thousands of us in the suburbs live within a long stone's throw of the tollway bearing her name and tens of thousands of us drive that road every day. The I-90 toll road from Rosemont through Elgin and on by Rockford to the edge of Wisconsin was renamed in Addams' honor five years ago, but many of us are barely aware of that change, steadfastly referring to the road as the Northwest Tollway the same way we keep calling Chicago's tallest building the Sears Tower long after the name was changed to Willis.

A lot of that is habit, of course, but some of it is simply a shortfall in appreciation.

Time passes and the detail of history fades, and, fortunate or not, that's just an inevitable part of progress. The impact of Addams and Hull House gets sort of lost in the rush to the future.

Next time you get a moment though, you might ask Siri who Jane Addams was or how Hull House made a difference.

Better yet, take in a tour of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, located at the University of Illinois at Chicago in two of the original settlement house buildings. The address is 800 S. Halsted St., Chicago. For information, call (312) 413-5353 or check the website at www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/hull_house.html.

As the museum literature says, it acts as a “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 immigrant neighbors as well as national and international public policy.”

She helped establish Hull House and its association in 1889, and her work affected policy on public health, education, labor, immigrants rights, women's suffrage, parks, the arts and philanthropy.

After Addams' death in 1935, the association carried on in its mission to “aid in the solutions of life in a great city, to help our neighbors build responsible, self-sufficient lives.”

In announcing bankruptcy and plans to close at the end of March, the organization said its funding simply couldn't keep up with the growing social welfare demands.

Think about the sad irony in that.