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A groundbreaking exhibition titled "Perennial City: Experiments in Urban Gardening" at the Hull House Museum at the University of Illinois Chicago, running through December 20, 2026, is prompting a contemporary reflection on the enduring quest to foster urban environments defined by compassion and equitable access to land. The exhibit meticulously unearths a largely forgotten chapter of Chicago’s social history: the ambitious urban farming initiatives spearheaded by the Hull House settlement in the early 20th century, which provided vital agricultural opportunities for the city’s burgeoning immigrant populations. This historical lens is particularly pertinent today, as urban centers grapple with food insecurity, immigrant integration, and the sustainable utilization of urban spaces.
The Hull House Legacy: A Holistic Approach to Urban Reform
Founded in 1889 by progressive reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, the Hull House settlement on Chicago’s Near West Side rapidly became a beacon of social innovation. At a time of unprecedented industrialization and immigration, the settlement aimed to uplift and integrate low-income immigrants, many of whom toiled in the city’s notorious garment sweatshops and meatpacking plants—conditions vividly, if fictitiously, portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s seminal 1906 novel The Jungle. Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a magnet for immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Bohemia, Greece, Poland, and Russia, whose arrival swelled the city’s population from just over one million in 1890 to nearly 2.2 million by 1910. These new arrivals often faced harsh living conditions, cultural alienation, and economic exploitation.
The Hull House complex, a sprawling 13-building red-brick urban sanctuary, offered a radical departure from the prevailing paternalistic attitudes towards the poor. Its approach was remarkably holistic, providing a comprehensive suite of services designed not merely to offer charity but to empower individuals and respect their diverse cultural traditions. The settlement housed a theater, gymnasium, day care, and kindergarten, alongside instruction in English, fine arts, crafts, and various trades. Its dining hall, a vibrant intellectual hub, famously hosted figures like Upton Sinclair, who gathered material for his investigative journalism and fiction there. This integrative model, now often described as "wraparound services," was revolutionary for its era, seeking to address the multifaceted challenges faced by immigrants.
Beyond formal education and social services, the Hull House recognized a fundamental human need for connection to the land, especially among immigrant communities who often hailed from agrarian backgrounds. While the rooftop of its nursery boasted an herb garden and the courtyard offered a rare patch of greenery in the dense tenement district, community members yearned for more substantial opportunities to cultivate their own food. This desire sparked a pivotal initiative that would leave an indelible, though often overlooked, mark on Chicago’s urban landscape.
The Genesis of Urban Agriculture: Securing Land for Immigrant Communities
The initial years of Hull House saw immigrants struggling to access arable land within the cramped residential districts. However, a nascent movement began to take shape towards the turn of the century. The severe economic downturn of the Panic of 1893, which led to widespread unemployment and hardship across the United States, prompted innovative relief efforts. Inspired by the "potato patches" movement in Detroit, where vacant lots were converted into gardens for the poor, Chicagoans began to explore similar solutions. Backed by organizations like the Chicago Bureau of Charities, modest idle lots within the city were incrementally transformed into productive farms.
In 1896, a significant step towards formalizing urban gardening emerged from within the Hull House itself. Immigrant gardeners, many of whom had participated in these early relief efforts, formed the People’s Friendly Club. This group, one of many social organizations regularly meeting at the settlement, is believed to be Chicago’s first formalized urban gardening club. Even after losing their initial farming plot across town, the intergenerational club maintained its community spirit, continuing to gather at Hull House for singing and dancing, underscoring the deep cultural and social value of their shared agricultural heritage. This persistence demonstrated not just a practical need for food, but a profound yearning for cultural expression and community building through the act of cultivation.
A Landmark Partnership: Hull House and International Harvester
The true breakthrough in securing substantial land for immigrant farming came through the efforts of Laura Dainty Pelham, Hull House’s theatrical director and a resident reformer. Recognizing the fervent desire of the People’s Friendly Club members to resume farming, Pelham founded the City Gardens Association in 1909. Possessing considerable social connections, she soon brokered an extraordinary deal with International Harvester (IH), then Chicago’s largest employer and a corporate giant of American industry.
The agreement was a remarkable alignment of mutual interests. IH, like many large corporations of the Progressive Era, had established a welfare department, headed by C.W. Price, which aimed to address poverty and improve the living conditions of its employees and the broader community. This was often driven by a combination of genuine social concern, a desire for public relations benefits, and a belief that a healthy, productive workforce was a stable one. Pelham successfully negotiated for IH to make 90 acres of adjacent, unused land surrounding its massive factory available for immigrants to cultivate. This site, roughly five miles from Hull House, offered an unprecedented opportunity for large-scale urban agriculture.
The initiative garnered significant public support, lauded by city officials and celebrated in newspaper editorials. It resonated with the ideals of the "City Beautiful" movement, a Progressive Era reform philosophy that promoted urban planning and beautification to improve the moral and civic life of cities. The idea that vacant, swampy land could be transformed into verdant, productive spaces, simultaneously alleviating poverty and enhancing civic aesthetics, held widespread appeal.
The City Gardens Association raised the equivalent of approximately $13,000 in today’s currency to drain and prepare 20 of the 90 acres for farming. After International Harvester staff provided the initial plowing and tilling, the People’s Friendly Club and other immigrant families were invited to grow crops on the land. Each family was allocated a substantial 150 x 37-foot plot. The first 100 immigrant growers reportedly earned the equivalent of $1,000 each season after investing less than a quarter of that amount, a significant income for families living in poverty. Laura Dainty Pelham enthusiastically declared it "the greatest movement in the ‘back to the soil’ idea that has originated in Chicago."
While undeniably impactful, the Hull House reformers’ approach, reflecting common attitudes of the era, was not without its paternalistic undertones. The language of "opportunity" and "uplift" often masked a desire for assimilation, suggesting that working the soil would foster self-sufficiency, industry, thrift, and honesty among the "needy." However, the program also genuinely supported immigrants, humanized them in the public eye, and, crucially, encouraged them to leverage their traditional agricultural expertise by reproducing cultural practices from their home countries. International Harvester’s corporate magazine, in a 1915 article, celebrated the project, noting "fine even rows of cabbages, beets, and turnips still waiting to be gathered in," and gardeners "lingering lovingly over the plots they have learned to look upon almost as their own property." The project was heralded as a "win-win" that provided self-help, kept "idle" city children off the streets, and significantly lessened "the necessity for bread lines and other forms of charity," as a Chicago Tribune headline proclaimed.
The Spreading Seed: Urban Gardens Flourish Across Chicago
The success of the Hull House-International Harvester model quickly inspired broader adoption. The City Gardens Association expanded its reach, securing additional land from the Western Electric Company and another 10 acres from a private estate. Following a Chicago Tribune reader’s letter offering vacant lots for the cause, Pelham actively campaigned to convert even more unused urban spaces into food production sites. The demand was overwhelming. A 1915 Chicago Tribune article titled "Aliens in rush for city farms" reported, "Two hundred Italians, Bohemians, and Slavs crowded into [the] Hull House dining hall yesterday afternoon to participate in the drawing for free garden plots."
James Calley, Chicago’s director of unemployment at the time, lamented, "Think of all the land within the city limits that lies idle year after year—and of the use it might be put to." By 1915, the City Gardens Association operated three other farm sites in various parts of the city, extending the reach of this innovative social welfare model. As Ross Jordan, curatorial manager at the Hull House Museum, notes, these farms allowed immigrants to "literally sow roots and put their knowledge into the Earth," thereby validating their traditional skills and providing a vital connection to their heritage in a new land.
Despite Pelham’s stated intention for immigrants to cultivate culturally preferred crops, her approach still carried an "essentializing" and somewhat paternalistic tone by today’s standards. She detailed a plan "sufficiently elastic to allow our Italian farmers plenty of room for garlic and peppers, our Irish friends potatoes, and our German contingent cabbages and kohlrabi, and still be regular enough to make a pleasant display and a profitable crop." A significant limitation for contemporary historians, as noted by Nate Ela, a Temple University political science and law professor who researched this history for his forthcoming book Cultivating the City: The Long Struggle to Put Land to Use, is the frustrating absence of firsthand accounts from the growers themselves. "You don’t know what the gardeners themselves actually thought, other than trying to read between the lines of what other people were saying about them," Ela points out, highlighting the challenges of recovering marginalized voices from historical records.
The Unraveling Dream: World War I and Shifting Policies
The burgeoning urban farm movement, rooted in community-led initiatives and philanthropic corporate partnerships, faced an abrupt shift with the nation’s entry into World War I in 1917. The City Gardens Association was absorbed by Chicago’s City Hall amid an aggressive national "war gardens" push for food security. While this initiative temporarily expanded urban cultivation across the country, it also moved away from the community-driven ethos of Hull House. By the summer of 1917, the ambitious push by an International Harvester leader to harness a patchwork of vacant lots to feed "half the city" had largely fizzled out.
The precise trajectory of farming by Hull House community members during the 1920s remains unclear due to scant records, especially after Laura Dainty Pelham’s death in 1924. However, the Great Depression saw a resurgence of sorts, with International Harvester once again offering plots for its laid-off workers to cultivate, demonstrating the enduring utility of such programs during economic crises.
Nate Ela argues that the very nature of how the Hull House-associated land was brokered—through deal-making with corporate elites reluctant to surrender private property permanently—ultimately sealed the fate of these early food gardens. Unlike modern community-led approaches that seek to secure permanent land tenure, these arrangements were often temporary leases or agreements. "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 explains. "And so in different ways at different times, people have tried to figure out ways to make it, if not permanent, at least longer lasting. And that’s been the struggle." This lack of permanent land access, he believes, fundamentally severed the momentum of urban farming at scale.
Furthermore, broader shifts in federal policy during the New Deal era moved away from supporting food production as a primary anti-poverty strategy. While President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) did support short-lived garden work-relief projects by 1935, the emphasis gradually shifted towards helping people purchase food rather than grow it. The first federal food stamp program was introduced in 1939, institutionalizing a different approach to food security. Concurrently, evolving social norms meant that younger generations were increasingly disinclined to work the land, further contributing to the decline of urban agricultural movements. The physical embodiment of the Hull House legacy also suffered a blow when, in a surprise move by Mayor Richard J. Daley, the complex was mostly demolished in 1963. Only two buildings remain today, forming part of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
Echoes in the Present: Chicago’s Contemporary Urban Farming Scene
The "Perennial City" exhibit urges contemporary urban growers to reflect on this once-lost history, demonstrating that the challenges and aspirations of today are deeply rooted in the past. As Ela states, the Hull House initiatives "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."
Today, Chicago boasts a vibrant and diverse urban farming scene, echoing the historical efforts to reclaim dormant land, expand nutrition access, and empower communities. The city is home to numerous urban farms and community gardens, with a growing recognition of their role in local food systems, environmental sustainability, and social equity.
A compelling parallel to the Hull House-brokered farms exists less than a mile from the former International Harvester site. Two small nonprofit farms, part of Windy City Harvest—an initiative of the Chicago Botanic Garden—are engaging disinvested populations and transforming industrial landscapes. The Richard J. Daley College Arturo Velasquez Institute (AVI) Farm, established in 2009 on an eighth of an acre, provides apprenticeships and sells and donates produce. Nearby, Rodeo Farm, spanning nearly 2 acres of vacant county land, offers workforce development for formerly incarcerated individuals, producing greens, root vegetables, sunflowers, and honey. These farms interrupt sobering industrial settings, much like their historical predecessors, with the sprawling Cook County Department of Corrections now replacing the Bridewell Prison, which was visible to growers of the Hull House era.
Perhaps the closest modern analog to the Hull House-Harvester gardens is found 15 miles away at Global Gardens in Albany Park. Situated on former candy factory property, this thriving community garden serves approximately 300 refugees, who cultivate food for their own kitchens, local markets, and a CSA subscription. Representing at least seven languages and diverse nations such as Myanmar, Afghanistan, Burundi, and Mexico, these growers cultivate crops often unavailable in local stores, providing both sustenance and a vital connection to their cultural heritage. This model directly addresses the needs of new immigrant populations, much like Hull House did over a century ago.
Adding star power to Chicago’s urban garden scene is the new Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit and Vegetable Garden at the Obama Presidential Center. Located ten miles from the original Harvester Gardens and across from the unassuming 61st Street Hoop House community garden, its 74 raised beds produced an impressive 429 pounds of produce for community groups within its first hundred days. This high-profile project underscores the increasing recognition of urban agriculture at institutional levels.
Lessons for a Perennial City: Cultivating Care and Sustainable Access
Chicago’s urban farming narrative is characterized by numerous fits and starts, including a significant interruption in the mid-20th century. As Nate Ela observes, "Part of the story I’m trying to tell [with the Hull House exhibit] is that it’s an achievement to bring about gardens and to get land access. But it’s also an achievement to end it." This statement highlights the constant struggle inherent in maintaining urban agricultural spaces against the pressures of development and shifting priorities.
While the Hull House and its associated Harvester gardens played a foundational role in establishing an urban garden model in Chicago, their ultimate impermanence offers crucial lessons for today. For such projects to achieve lasting impact, they must evolve beyond the "paternalistic" approaches of the Progressive Era. Modern initiatives, Ela contends, must prioritize empowering community members, engaging them deeply in decision-making, and actively working to secure and formalize longer-term access to land. This shift from temporary, brokered arrangements to community-led land stewardship is vital for creating truly resilient and equitable urban food systems.
The current generation of urban growers, though perhaps unaware of the specific historical narratives, instinctively understands the underlying challenges. "Most people [today] may not know the stories [from the past], but they know the challenges because they’re doing it," Ela concludes. "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 thus serves as a powerful reminder that cultivating a city rooted in care and equitable access to land is not a new aspiration but a continuous, evolving endeavor, drawing strength from the forgotten successes and instructive failures of the past.
