The Hull-House courtyard is usually a place of conspicuous silence. It sits on the site of the former settlement complex founded by social reformer Jane Addams — at least, until it was almost entirely razed in the 1960s to make way for the campus of the University of Illinois Chicago. Across Halsted Street sat the country’s very first juvenile justice court, established at Addams’ behest. That’s gone too, now a parking lot. But on Sept. 30, the spirit of the original Hull-House settlement flared alive again. Homeless Chicagoans gathered in the courtyard to attend one of two glass-blowing workshops led by local nonprofits Red Line Service and Firebird Community Arts. The organizations will return to lead more programming in the spring, including a ceramics workshop in March. All were invited to the space by the adjoining Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, whose new exhibition, “Radical Craft,” is open now through July. It’s the museum’s most ambitious overhaul in years — but that’s not enough, argue director Liesl Olson and curator Ross Jordan. “Radical Craft” also reorients the museum towards the very visitors who might have relied on Hull-House’s services 100 years ago, like the unhoused and recent migrants. The museum’s assistant director, Matthew Randle-Bent, is even planning to resurrect the Hull-House Theatre in partnership with local storefront theater companies with inaugural programming to be announced in the spring. “One person put it really well in the second glass-blowing workshop when they said, ‘This is a good way for me to get out of my tent.’ If you’re not going to work every day or have close family relationships, it’s hard to get up and do things. You get kind of stuck,” Jordan says. “Most of our programs are free. Our tours are free. This is a way to give that community a special invitation.” “We’re documenting the ways in which Hull-House historically had politics around radical hospitality,” Olson adds. “Radical Craft’s” workshops recall one of Hull-House’s signature programs: its Labor Museum, which, confusingly, wasn’t much of a museum at all. It was a series of craft workshops and demonstrations, transmitting valuable — and, in an industrializing world, vanishing — artisanal skills to anyone who showed up. True to that ethos, “Radical Craft” has made the Hull-House Museum more interactive than ever. You can lie on Addams’ bed. English and Spanish pamphlets throughout the exhibition can be bound together in a small book to take home — a nod to Hull-House co-founder Ellen Gates Starr, who once ran a book bindery out of the settlement. Some of the books Starr bound herself are, in fact, free to pick up and peruse; afterward, you can head into Hull-House’s new bookstore and buy your own relevant volumes, including the museum’s first-ever catalog. Upstairs, a Hull-House loom with a decades-old weaving project still on it has become an interactive art piece, with textile artist Emily Winter returning intermittently to continue the original artisan’s pattern. “Normally, when we put items like these on display, it would be under glass boxes. But we wanted to stay close to our mission of giving people access to the material,” Jordan says. Though Starr and Addams co-founded Hull-House in 1889, Starr’s legacy has been overshadowed by Addams’ in the annals of history. So has Mary Keyser’s, their housekeeper and a beloved neighborhood figure, who died five years after the settlement was established. “Radical Craft,” with its frank discussion of the three women’s class and circumstance, corrects the record. “Everybody knows Jane Addams, but they don’t know much about Ellen Gates Starr — and she was by far the most radical. It’s really both of them who launched Hull-House with the help of Mary Keyser, who did the real work,” Olson says. Chicago Herald and ExaminerEllen Gates Starr at Hull House. Gates Starr, along with her friend Jane Addams, founded Hull House in 1889.Steve Marino/Chicago TribuneThe exterior of Hull House at Polk and Halsted streets on Jan. 8, 1956.APSocial work pioneer Jane Addams talks with young people visiting Hull House in Chicago in an undated photo.Chicago Tribune historical photoJane Addams, founder of Chicago's Hull House settlement and the social conscience of the city, poses for a portrait in 1923 after her return from a worldwide tour.Chicago Tribune archiveChildren work in an art class at Hull House in 1911 in Chicago.Chicago Herald and ExaminerPottery class teacher Evangeline Wallace helps student Domminick Randazzo make a tray at Hull House, circa 1927.Chicago Tribune historical photoJane Addams, left, and Tami Yamamuro, a protege of Addams', at Hull House, circa 1927. Yamamuro, of California, came to Hull House to study following graduation with a degree in social work from the University of California.Chicago Herald and ExaminerEllen Gates Starr, left, and Anne Cobden-Sanderson, suffragette, at Hull House, circa 1926. Starr was the co-founder of Hull House with Jane Addams.Chicago Tribune historical photoHull House in 1941, more than 50 years after it was founded by Jane Addams.Chicago AmericanJane Addams, right, with Mary McDowell, in an undated photo. McDowell was a kindergarten teacher at Hull House.Chicago TribuneDominick Sposato works in a boys cooking class at Hull House in an undated photo.Chicago Tribune historical photoJane Addams, co-founder of Hull House, in an undated photo.Chicago TribuneTami Yamamuro, left, a protege of Jane Addams, at Hull House, circa 1927. Yamamuro, of California, came to Hull House to study following graduation with a degree in social work from the University of California.Chicago Tribune historical photoAlphonse Sorrentino as Gelsimino and Margir Shea as Columbine for a performance of "Harlequinade" at Hull House, circa 1928.Chicago Tribune historical photoReturning to the Hull House stage, the setting of his musical debut in the West Side settlement house's marching band, Benny Goodman teaches a Hull House youngster, Jerry Marzullo, 7, the proper fingering on his world-famous clarinet in 1960. Goodman recalled he was about 10 when he played "Runnin' Wild" on the Hull House stage.Chicago Tribune historical photoQueen Marie of Romania walks through Hull House during her brief visit to Chicago in November 1926. The queen regretted that she didn't have more time and opportunity to visit with Jane Addams.Associated PressJane Addams poses with some of her young visitors at Hull House in Chicago in May 1935.Chicago Tribune historical photoA portion of Hull House is razed to make way for the modern buildings of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus on June 14, 1963, in Chicago..Show CaptionChicago Herald and Examiner1 of 18Ellen Gates Starr at Hull House. Gates Starr, along with her friend Jane Addams, founded Hull House in 1889.Expand But if “Radical Craft” has a muse, it’s those who anonymously passed through Hull-House’s arches. In preparation for “Radical Craft,” the museum team dug through bulletins, catalogs and yearbooks in an attempt to identify as many Hull-House beneficiaries as possible. Those names snake up the banister, run along the edge of the textiles room and continue up to the third floor. The best documented among them — like sculptor Jesús Torres, painter Morris Topchevsky and writer Hilda Satt Polacheck — are subjects of standalone displays. “For some of these folks, we know something more about them than just their names. And for some of them, we really only know their names,” Olson says. “We wanted to underscore absence.” Speaking of absence: Where the old Hull-House Museum only glancingly acknowledged Addams’ and Starr’s sexual orientation, “Radical Craft” centers their domestic partnerships — and that of other influential lesbians in their network — as an important engine of the settlement. A portrait of Mary Rozet Smith, Addams’ life partner, is prominently displayed in the upstairs bedroom, along with a love poem Addams wrote her; Tyler’s portrait of the physician and reformer Cornelia De Bey, who worked at the settlement and was in a relationship with Tyler’s sister, hangs downstairs. (To hit the point home, one of the books on display from Starr’s bindery is a poetry collection by Sappho.) A copper bowl and pitcher made by Russian coppersmith Falick Novick are on display with a portrait of Novick and his wife Tillie and son Mitchell at their copper shop at 528 W. 12th St. in Chicago, circa 1912. The copper art and portrait are part of the “Radical Craft” exhibit inside the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Oct. 2, 2024. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune) After Hull-House was razed, the Jane Addams Hull-House Association continued the work of the original settlement, albeit in a more diffuse way, until it went bankrupt in 2012. What stands as the Hull-House Museum today is actually two surviving buildings from the settlement placed together: the Hull mansion, built in the 1850s by real estate mogul Charles Jerold Hull, and the Residents’ Dining Hall, where the Hull-House’s residents — its full-time employees — dined and communed. The museum opened in 1967. After “Radical Craft” closes, Olson and Jordan hope to refresh the permanent exhibition on the first floor, where Olson says UIC’s role in the razing of the settlement is, at present, told “a little too quietly for (her) taste.” Another possible subject for exploration is the period after Addams’ death in 1935 but before the settlement’s closure in 1963 — one Jordan feels is overlooked. “Unlike other sites, we’re talking about a 75-year history up until Hull-House closes. There’s a truncated sense that it ends with Jane Addams’ lifetime. But it’s much bigger than people think it is,” he says. In the meantime, “Radical Craft” is a start. Far from ending with Addams, Hull-House’s story may just be entering its next chapter. Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer. “Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889-1935” runs through July 27, 2025, at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, 800 S. Halsted St., open Tuesdays-Fridays 10 a.m. to 4:50 p.m., Sundays noon to 4:50 p.m., closed Mondays and Saturdays; free admission; more information at hullhousemuseum.org.