Close Quarters

Grace Bagley was working with the leaders of Hull House in 1893 when they undertook to investigate tenement conditions on Chicago’s West Side. The Hull House survey resulted in detailed, color-coded maps that documented nationalities, wages and sanitary conditions—all concerns that Grace continued to raise in the years to come. She was the featured speaker at a 1918 suffrage meeting in Boston, urging the attendees to take up the cause of tenement sanitary conditions to prevent an outbreak of disease. Even in suburban Hinsdale, typhoid quarantines were common in the early 20th century.