The Henry Gerber House is located on North Crilly Court in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Inspired by nascent gay-rights organizations he had seen in Germany, Gerber held meetings here and published newsletters, the first known gay civil rights periodicals in the country, for a year until the Chicago police raided the house in 1925.

The surrounding neighborhood is urban and densely developed, primarily with attached residential two-story houses built in the late 19th century in the architectural styles of that era, on streets lined with shade trees.

On its north is a recessed tripartite single-paned window with sidelights and transom topped by a lintel of splayed rusticated blocks.

On its north, separating a similar gable on the neighboring house, is a molded finial-topped square pillar rising from a corbel below the frieze.

[1] In the basement, drywall covers the original exposed brick walls, laid in running bond, and has also been used to enclose an added bathroom as part of a general modern renovation.

The area today known as Old Town was unsettled marshland ceded to the city by local Ojibwa Native Americans in the 1833 Treaty of Chicago.

It remained uninhabited until German refugees began arriving due to unrest there during the 1840s and filled in the wetlands to establish cabbage farms.

[5] Developer Daniel Francis Crilly built the houses on the street named after him, including 1710, in 1885 in the emerging Queen Anne Style.

When the United States entered World War I against his native Germany, he applied for and received conscientious objector status.

After the war ended the following year and he was no longer treated with suspicion as a German, he re-enlisted and was assigned to the occupying forces.

There were brothels at either end of North Crilly, making it less likely that the police would care much about a resident's sexual activities as long as he or she kept them discreet.

The few urban American gay communities (almost exclusively male) that had emerged in the early 20th century were under constant police surveillance and frequently harassed.

[1] Gerber found the Chicago gay community, centered on the nearby neighborhood of Tower Town, flamboyant but less sophisticated than their German counterparts, with no political consciousness.

Late in 1924 he filed incorporation papers with the state of Illinois for a nonprofit he called the Society for Human Rights, giving as its address his own, 1710 North Crilly Court.

[1] The society's name was a direct translation of Bund für Menschenrecht, one of the German homophile organizations of the era.

Gerber gave little direct hint of its purpose in the charter included in the incorporation application, saying the society's purpose was "to promote and to protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of facts according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age."

It is likely that they met in the house's basement, as its front and rear entrances made it easy to enter and leave undetected, while the single window could easily be curtained off to prevent onlookers from seeing who was inside.

[1] The society's brief existence ended in July 1925, when the police raided the house in the early hours of a Sunday morning, accompanied by a reporter from the Chicago American afternoon tabloid newspaper.

[1] Charges against Gerber were at first heavily prosecuted, but ultimately dismissed at a third trial since the police had not gotten a search warrant before entering the house and seizing evidence.

He would never recover the documents seized by postal inspectors looking for evidence of violations of the Comstock laws which forbid sending obscene materials through the mail.

The legal struggle cost him considerable amounts of money as well as his job with the Post Office, and afterwards he left Chicago for New York.

[1] The owners resisted the common late 20th-century trend of gutting the interior of historic houses to create more open space within.