Sinclair laid out his vision in a June 1906 article in The Independent, following the model proposed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her book The Home. He sought "authors, artists, and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men" -- creative and intellectual workers who chafed at the inefficiency of maintaining individual households. The plan was radical in scope: homes without kitchens, children raised communally under a Board of Women Directors elected by their mothers, and enough farmland to make the colony self-sufficient. On July 16, 1906, Sinclair published a letter in The New York Times announcing a public meeting at the Berkeley Lyceum on 44th Street. The Times ran a sympathetic editorial the next day, acknowledging the genuine difficulty of raising a family in the city, though the editors doubted the practicality of communal child-rearing and noted that land near New York would be prohibitively expensive.

The public meeting on July 17 drew an enthusiastic crowd. Sinclair dominated the two-hour session, speaking for ninety minutes. Men and women alike could vote upon paying the ten-dollar initiation fee. Sinclair countered the Times editorial's claim about land costs, stating he had offers at ten to fifty dollars per acre, far below the three to forty thousand dollars per acre the editors had estimated. Gaylord Wilshire was named temporary treasurer. A nationwide questionnaire had already drawn 44 responses, including one from a meat packer in Brooklyn. Respondents preferred a location close to New York City, ideally in New Jersey. The colony opened that October in Helicon Hall, a former school building on Walnut Street in Englewood, between Woodland and Lincoln Streets. About 46 adults and 15 children took up residence in what they hoped would become a new model for American domestic life.

The colony's ideals frayed almost immediately upon contact with reality. Despite its rhetoric of communal egalitarianism, the colony hired traditional servants to handle domestic work -- the very labor it had been founded to abolish through collective effort. More troublingly, the community explicitly banned Black people from membership. Jewish applicants were less publicly but equally excluded. According to Perdita Buchan's 2007 book Utopia, New Jersey, Sinclair quietly returned one Jewish applicant's money with an apology, explaining that other members had voted against admission -- even though Sinclair owned 160 of the colony's 230 shares and controlled roughly 70 percent of the board's vote. He could have overruled the exclusion but chose not to. The utopia that The Jungle's profits built was, in practice, a community limited to a particular kind of progressive: white, educated, and comfortable enough to afford the initiation fee.

In February 1907, a chicken pox outbreak struck ten children in the colony. Worse followed on March 16, when Helicon Hall burned to the ground. One man, Lester Briggs, a carpenter, died in the fire. At the time, the colony housed over 70 residents, including colonists, boarders, and workers. Members -- though not Sinclair himself -- were reimbursed through insurance payments. The colony disbanded. Sinclair went on to write dozens more books and run for governor of California, but he never attempted another communal experiment. The site on Walnut Street returned to Englewood's ordinary suburban fabric, and the brief utopia that had promised to liberate families from the drudgery of individual housekeeping disappeared into the footnotes of Progressive Era history. What remains is the uncomfortable irony: a colony founded on proceeds from a book about exploitation was itself built on exclusion.