When settlement residents saw opportunities to provide additional meeting grounds that would appeal to different cross-sections of the city’s inhabitants, they oft en expanded beyond the walls of the house itself. But their core spatial strategy of constructing places in which urbanites could engage in direct personal exchanges remained constant. Over the course of Hull-House’s two-decade expansion, the settlement complex dedicated portions of its city-block footprint to a coffeehouse, dining hall, art gallery, and auditorium so that city dwellers could continue to have access to places of exchange. Other segments of the settlement’s expanded facilities provided meeting grounds for the rapidly growing number of social clubs hosted by the settlement. Clubs such as the Working People’s Social Science Club and Hull-House Woman’s Club initially met in the drawing room, parlor, and bedrooms of Hull-House but later relocated to spaces in adjacent buildings that replicated in slightly enlarged dimensions the spatial and social dynamics of the original settlement home. The semi-public spaces in which the settlement’s social clubs met invited city dwellers to enter into what Addams characterizes as “friendly relations” with one another. In these spaces, urbanites came in “contact, many of them for the first time, with the industrial and social problems challenging the moral resources of our contemporary life.” As club members encountered new understandings of the industrial city’s problems through lectures and discussions at their club meetings, Addams claimed that they were “led from a sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility.” Engaging in the production and dissemination of sociological information helped members of a club know how best to express “sympathy and kindliness at the same time in concrete form.” The small, semi-public spaces of the settlement put city dwellers in a position to extend the movement’s brand of sociality beyond its physical boundaries by helping them imagine themselves not only as friends to one another but as citizens of a much larger world. The many different places of exchange crammed together within the settlement cultivated “citizens who are conversant with adverse social conditions” and who, along with similarly informed urbanites in other cities, “may in time remove the reproach of social neglect and indifference which has so long rested upon the citizens of the new world.”49 Addams and other settlement intellectuals argued that the movement’s spatial innovations had the potential to transform not only the industrial city’s social landscape but also the larger modern world of which it was a part.
Figure 3. Hull-House Dining Room. JAMC 0000 0162 1007, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
The spatial logic of the mature settlement complex’s layout underscored the model of relationality that the settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy privileged. Although the settlement’s spaces became slightly less flexible as its different services, activities, and organizations acquired their own discrete locations, settlement residents continued to use single spaces for multiple purposes and to repurpose spaces that had been earmarked for uses that were no longer necessary. The settlement movement’s mixed-use and improvisational approach to urban space frustrated architects such as Allen B. Pond, who designed the Hull-House complex and five additional settlements. He found it irritating that Hull-House was an “aggregation of partially related units” rather than a “logical organism.” In his desire for an architecture that was “made up of parts having special functions but still interrelated and severally interdependent,” Pond articulated the reasoning of single-use zoning that was emerging in the early 1900s and that would exert a stranglehold on city planning for much of the remainder of the twentieth century. While he lamented that Hull-House had “grown by a long series of wholly unforeseeable accretions,” the ways in which the settlement house layered multiple uses on single spaces and placed its many activities and services in close proximity to one another echoed in physical form the settlement’s social philosophy of contact and friction.50 But, even more important, the settlement’s accretive style of urbanism perpetuated and extended the fellow-feelings that may have originated within a particular club or at a specific lecture beyond the spatial confines of that club. The settlement’s mixture and overlap of uses within its finite number of rooms drew urbanites into and through its various spaces, where they would have opportunities to follow-up on their initial encounters with one another and pursue both more personal and cerebral relationships. In many ways, the comprehensive spatial logic and organization of settlements such as Hull-House helped city dwellers learn how to extend the fellow-feelings they forged within the discrete spaces that accommodated a club meeting or a meal to the urbanites they would encounter outside those specific spaces.
Du Bois expressed the same kind of confidence in the settlement movement’s spatial strategies to solve the city’s social problems—particularly its racial problems—that Addams and other settlement intellectuals had expressed. Although Du Bois would not live in a settlement again after leaving Philadelphia in 1897, he continued to draw on the movement’s discourse of sympathy and its spatial techniques in offering solutions to race relations. While discussing the “means of bettering the condition of the Negroes” of New York City at a small, mixed-race conference at Mount Olivet Baptist Church on January 4, 1903, Du Bois proposed the “establishment of a kind of social settlement for Negroes.”51 He envisioned a settlement house that would serve as a “clearing house for the local race problem, acting as a directory and adviser in matters of almsgiving, education, religion, and work.” By establishing a “physical center for movements affecting the betterment of the Negro, for the gathering of careful information concerning his needs and condition, and for furthering effective cooperation among all established agencies which seek his good,” this settlement would create a space in which an “adjustment between the life of the segregated Negro group and that of the larger city” could be worked out. The successful implementation of these social services and the urban Negro’s social “adjustment,” though, ultimately hinged on the type of personal contact that the settlement house was designed to initiate. Du Bois counseled the meeting’s participants that “personal friendship” is ultimately the “main-spring of social help” and the means by which the proposed settlement would be best able to “help the weak and unfortunate” and “find enlarged opportunity for Negroes of ability and desert.”52 These interracial friendships and the public sympathy upon which they were built would, Du Bois professed, lead to increased social and economic opportunities for the black city dweller.
Although the group that gathered at Mount Olivet opted not to act on Du Bois’s suggestion to build a settlement house for New York’s black community, other individuals active in the city’s settlement scene heard of his proposal and attempted to translate his ideas into social practice and physical form. After learning about Du Bois’s recommendation from Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder of Greenwich House in Greenwich Village, Mary White Ovington wrote him in the fall of 1904 to inform him that she hoped to undertake the “work first spoken of in those resolutions” by doing “some work among the Negroes.”53 Using The Philadelphia Negro as her guide and frequently consulting its author—who, in her estimation, knew the “situation in the city pretty well” and was very familiar with “settlements and their forms of work”—Ovington commenced her own settlement work with an exhausting research routine. By early 1905, she began to visualize the social and physical forms that would best materialize and perpetuate the types of interracial relationships that would lead to individual and collective growth. Ovington did not aspire to meet all the needs Du Bois had enumerated at Mount Olivet, but she did agree with him that the work had to be “carried on by colored and white alike”: “Every month I feel that the two races must work together in any philanthropic work in the city. It must be isolation that creates much of the difficulty in the South, and why should we try to produce unnecessary difficulties for ourselves in the North?”54
Recognizing