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A groundbreaking exhibition at the Hull House Museum at the University of Illinois Chicago, titled "Perennial City: Experiments in Urban Gardening," is compelling visitors to reflect on the historical roots and enduring relevance of urban agriculture in fostering community well-being and equitable land access. Running through December 20, 2026, the exhibit delves into a little-known chapter of Chicago’s history, illuminating how the pioneering social reformers of Hull House, in partnership with major corporations, empowered immigrant communities to transform vacant urban plots into thriving farms over a century ago. This historical narrative, often overshadowed, presents a radical vision of social welfare and urban planning that resonates profoundly with contemporary challenges concerning food insecurity, land access, and community empowerment in diverse urban landscapes.
The Genesis of Care: Hull House and Early Urban Reform
The story begins in 1889, when progressive reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established the Hull House settlement on Chicago’s Near West Side. This wasn’t merely a charitable institution; it was conceived as a vibrant urban complex dedicated to serving the burgeoning low-income immigrant population, many of whom toiled in the city’s notorious garment sweatshops, meatpacking plants, and other factories under egregious conditions. These harsh realities, vividly chronicled in Upton Sinclair’s seminal 1906 novel The Jungle, painted a stark picture of industrial exploitation and urban squalor. Immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Bohemia, Greece, Poland, and Russia arrived in Chicago, often with rich agricultural backgrounds, only to find themselves confined to cramped tenements with scant access to green space or opportunities to practice their traditional skills.
Hull House emerged as a beacon of hope and a radical experiment in holistic social reform. Its 13 red-brick buildings offered a comprehensive array of "wraparound services," a concept far ahead of its time. Beyond providing essential instruction in English, fine arts, crafts, and trades, it boasted a theater, gymnasium, day care, and kindergarten. The dining hall became a celebrated hub for intellectuals and social activists, including Sinclair himself, who frequented it while researching his exposé of the meatpacking industry. The settlement aimed to respect and integrate the cultural traditions of its diverse residents, offering not just aid but avenues for skill development and self-expression.
While Hull House featured a modest herb garden on its nursery rooftop and a paved courtyard playground, the profound desire among community members to cultivate their own food remained largely unfulfilled. Many had farmed in their homelands, and the absence of arable land in their dense urban environment was a significant void. This yearning spurred the Hull House reformers to seek land farther afield, catalyzing what would become one of the settlement’s most remarkable, yet largely forgotten, achievements: the establishment of large-scale urban farms for immigrants.
A Corporate-Community Alliance: The International Harvester Farms
The turning point came with an unprecedented collaboration between social reformers and corporate power. Inspired by the "potato patch" relief gardens for the poor in Detroit during the severe economic Panic of 1893, Chicagoans began converting modest idle lots into community gardens. In 1896, a group of immigrant gardeners, many of whom gathered at Hull House, formalized their efforts into the People’s Friendly Club, arguably Chicago’s first organized urban gardening association. Even after losing their initial plot, the club continued to meet at Hull House, demonstrating the deep-seated community desire for agricultural engagement.
Laura Dainty Pelham, Hull House’s theatrical director and a resident, recognized this profound need. In 1909, she founded the City Gardens Association. Leveraging her extensive social connections, Pelham orchestrated a landmark deal with International Harvester, then Chicago’s largest employer. The company agreed to make 90 acres of its unused land, roughly five miles from Hull House, available for cultivation by immigrants. This extraordinary partnership, brokered with C.W. Price, head of International Harvester’s welfare department, aligned corporate interests in public relations and worker welfare with the reformers’ goal of poverty alleviation and community uplift.
As detailed by Nate Ela, a Temple University political science and law professor whose forthcoming 2027 book, Cultivating the City: The Long Struggle to Put Land to Use, pieces together this forgotten history, the initiative was hailed as a win-win. It offered a pathway to self-sufficiency for tenement-dwellers and contributed to the ideals of the "City Beautiful" movement, which sought to enhance urban aesthetics and quality of life through planned green spaces. The City Gardens Association raised the equivalent of $13,000 in today’s currency to drain and prepare 20 swampy acres for farming. After International Harvester staff completed the initial plowing and tilling, the People’s Friendly Club and other immigrant families were invited to sow their crops.
The program proved immensely successful. Each of the first 100 immigrant growers received a 150 x 37-foot plot, reportedly earning the equivalent of $1,000 per season after investing less than a quarter of that amount. Corporate publications, like International Harvester’s own magazine, lauded the initiative, describing "fine even rows of cabbages, beets, and turnips" and "enthusiastic gardeners still lingering lovingly over the plots they have learned to look upon almost as their own property." Newspaper editorials championed the effort, with one Chicago Tribune headline proclaiming, "The necessity for bread lines and other forms of charity have been greatly lessened." Pelham herself enthusiastically declared it "the greatest movement in the ‘back to the soil’ idea that has originated in Chicago."
While the reformers’ language sometimes reflected the paternalistic attitudes common in the Progressive Era, emphasizing "opportunity" and "uplift" to foster assimilation, the program nonetheless empowered immigrants to leverage their agricultural expertise. It allowed them to reproduce cultural practices from their home countries, planting culturally preferred crops like garlic and peppers for Italian farmers, potatoes for the Irish, and cabbages and kohlrabi for Germans, as documented by Pelham. This aspect, while perhaps "essentializing" by today’s standards, validated their traditional skills and provided a vital connection to their heritage in a new land.
The Spreading Seed: Urban Gardens Flourish and Fade
The success of the Hull House-brokered farms quickly inspired a wider movement across Chicago. The City Gardens Association secured additional land from the Western Electric Company and a private estate. After a Chicago Tribune reader’s letter offered more lots for the cause, Pelham launched a city-wide campaign to convert more vacant spaces into productive farms. The demand was overwhelming: "Two hundred Italians, Bohemians, and Slavs crowded into [the] Hull House dining hall yesterday afternoon to participate in the drawing for free garden plots," reported the Chicago Tribune in 1915 under the headline "Aliens in rush for city farms." By then, the City Garden Association managed three other farm sites across the city, demonstrating the profound civic interest in maximizing the use of "idle" urban land. James Calley, Chicago’s director of unemployment, remarked, "Think of all the land within the city limits that lies idle year after year—and of the use it might be put to."
However, the momentum of this community-led urban farming initiative began to wane with the onset of World War I. In 1917, as the nation geared up for an aggressive "war gardens" push for national food security, Chicago’s City Hall absorbed the City Gardens Association. This shift effectively moved the movement away from its grassroots, people-led origins toward a more centralized, government-controlled effort. The ambitious plan by an International Harvester leader to harness vacant lots to feed "half the city" ultimately fizzled.
Records from the 1920s are sparse, making it difficult to ascertain the extent of farming by Hull House community members, particularly after Laura Dainty Pelham’s death in 1924. We do know that during the Great Depression, International Harvester once again offered plots to its laid-off workers, demonstrating the enduring utility of such initiatives during economic hardship.
According to Nate Ela, the ultimate failure to secure permanent land access for these agricultural projects was a critical flaw. The model relied on temporary agreements with corporate elites, rather than community-led efforts to establish lasting land tenure. "A city is a hard place to hold onto land for anything for a long period of time if you don’t own it," Ela notes, highlighting the persistent struggle for long-term land security in urban environments.
Further contributing to the decline was a fundamental shift in national policy during the New Deal era. Anti-poverty support transitioned from empowering people to grow their own food to helping them purchase it. While President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) briefly supported garden work-relief projects by 1935, these were short-lived. The first federal food stamp program emerged in 1939, solidifying a new approach to food security centered on consumption rather than production. Changing social norms also played a role, as younger generations increasingly gravitated away from agricultural labor. The physical embodiment of this reform movement, the Hull House complex itself, was largely demolished in a surprise move by Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1963, with only two buildings surviving as part of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
Echoes in the Present: Cultivating a City Rooted in Care Today
Despite its eventual decline and subsequent erasure from popular memory, the Hull House-International Harvester urban farming experiment offers invaluable lessons for today’s urban growers and policymakers. "It changed people’s ideas of what the city should look like and how people should be able to get access to land and use resources in the city," Ela reflects. The exhibit’s central question—"What does it mean to cultivate a city rooted in care and access to land?"—is more relevant than ever as immigrants, non-traditional farmers, and food-insecure populations navigate diminished access to federal support and arable land.
Chicago today boasts a vibrant urban farming scene, echoing the historical struggles and innovations of the past. Contemporary efforts continue to reclaim dormant land, expand nutrition access, and empower communities, demonstrating striking parallels to the Hull House era.
Less than a mile from the former Harvester site, two small nonprofit farms, programs of Windy City Harvest (part of the Chicago Botanic Gardens), exemplify this continuity. The Richard J. Daley College Arturo Velasquez Institute (AVI) Farm, an eighth-acre site, has provided apprenticeships since 2009, selling and donating fresh produce. Nearby, Rodeo Farm, spanning nearly 2 acres of vacant county land, offers workforce development for formerly incarcerated individuals, who cultivate greens, root vegetables, sunflowers, and honey. These initiatives, like their historical predecessors, engage disinvested populations and interrupt sobering industrial settings—the sprawling Cook County Department of Corrections now replaces the Bridewell Prison, which was visible to Hull House-era growers.
Perhaps the closest modern analogue to the Hull House-Harvester gardens is Global Gardens in Albany Park, located 15 miles away on city property that once housed a candy factory. Here, approximately 300 refugees from diverse nations such as Myanmar (speaking at least seven languages), Afghanistan, Burundi, and Mexico, grow food for their kitchens, local markets, and a CSA subscription. These gardeners cultivate crops not typically found in local stores, fostering food sovereignty and cultural connection.
Adding significant visibility to Chicago’s urban garden scene is the new Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit and Vegetable Garden at the Obama Presidential Center. Situated ten miles from the original Harvester Gardens, across the street from the smaller 61st Street Hoop House community garden, its 74 raised beds produced an impressive 429 pounds of produce within its first hundred days, intended for distribution to community groups. This high-profile project brings national attention to the ongoing efforts to integrate food production into the urban fabric.
Chicago’s urban farming story is indeed marked by numerous fits and starts, with a long interruption in the mid-20th century. Ross Jordan, the Hull House Museum’s curatorial manager, hopes that "people who are doing urban garden work now can say, ‘Oh, I’m a part of a longer lineage that goes back to Hull House.’" The exhibit serves as a powerful reminder that while bringing gardens to life and securing land access are achievements, the sustained effort to maintain them, as Ela points out, is equally significant.
For urban farming projects to achieve lasting impact, the lessons from the Progressive Era are clear: future endeavors must move beyond paternalistic approaches. True sustainability lies in deeply engaging community members and empowering them to secure and formalize longer-term access to the land. As Ela aptly concludes, "Most people [today] may not know the stories [from the past], but they know the challenges because they’re doing it. They’re finding secure access to land, and doing it in a way that’s empowering for people in the community." The "Perennial City" exhibit at the Hull House Museum thus serves not merely as a historical retrospective but as a vital call to action, urging a renewed commitment to cultivating urban spaces rooted in care, equity, and enduring community ownership.
