Chicago Commons

Chicago Commons, known since 1954 as the Chicago Commons Association, is a social service organization and former settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Originally located on the near Northwest Side and now headquartered in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, it serves underresourced communities throughout the city.

For the first six decades of its existence, Chicago Commons was a settlement house patterned on Jane Addams' Hull House, with a group of resident social workers. Throughout this period, it was headed by the Taylor family, father Graham Taylor (head resident 1894-1922) and daughter Lea Demarest Taylor (head resident 1922-1954). Subsequently, it sold its original settlement house and shifted to a more conventional social service model, merging with several other former settlement houses to create a citywide organization.

The founder of Chicago Commons, Graham Taylor, followed the model of Hull House in his settlement work. Taylor was a professor of "applied Christianity" at the Chicago Theological Seminary. He established the settlement in 1894, in a poor immigrant neighborhood a short distance northwest of downtown, and moved there with his wife and four children in 1895.

In his academic career, Taylor specialized in training for social work, founding the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration in 1903. He had originally envisioned the Chicago Commons as a sort of field laboratory for research and training in social work, but this quickly gave way to a broader conception of the settlement's obligations to the community. The settlement aligned itself with the labor movement, and adopted "industrial and social democracy" as a guiding principle.

The Taylors were soon joined by others, and the settlement boasted 22 adult residents by 1900. They expanded to a five-story building located on Grand Avenue at Morgan Street in 1901. Like Hull House and the Northwestern University Settlement House, the building was designed by noted arts and crafts architects Pond & Pond.

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