Brownsville, Brooklyn, depicted in this street scene, was a poor but densely settled neighborhood. It was a center of social activism--Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in the United States there in 1916 and the community was…
These three maps for the south side of Chicago illustrate the stark color line separating the Black Belt neighborhoods from white neighborhoods in the city. Even as the African American population grew in the Great Migration, the city remained…
Little Italy, west of Chicago’s central business district, was a dense ethnic neighborhood that HOLC officials concluded was risky for residential investment. The area saw little investment until the late 1950s, when state and federal initiatives…