Map of Chicago's Gangland

On my recent visit to the Newberry Library, I walked into the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography. It was not clear whether the public is welcome there but the room was unlocked. On a large table under glass was a copy of A Map of Chicago's Gangland from Authentic Sources. This is a tounge-in-cheek map from 1931 "designed to inculcate the most important principles of piety and virtue in young persons and graphically portray the evil and sin of large cities."

This map romanticizes the prohibition era and Al Capone style gangsters with details showing events from gang wars, neighborhoods such as Little Sicily, bootleggers, auto theft, Mrs. O'Leary's cow, a lawyer running to spring his client and machine gunners from Detroit arriving for "Post-Graduate work," and a scale of murders, instead of miles. Gangland killings are marked with skulls and crossbones. Here is a detail of the area around the Newberry.

The map can be seen in greater detail at the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Note the cartographic and cultural differences between a 1931 gangster map and the current map.

Mapping the Gangs of Chicago-is there any value?

The Chicago Crime Commission creates maps of gang territories for internal use. Elliott Ramos from radio station WBEZ obtained these maps in a freedom of information request and made them available through WBEZ's web page. Here is a sample map.

With 59 or more gangs and 625 different factions you need the kind of crazy patterned symbols seen above to distinguish them all. Here is a sample legend for this particular west side neighborhood.

Ramos took these maps and created an interactive gang map, overlaid onto google maps.

There is an interesting discussion on WBEZ's Afternoon Shift with Ramos, Natalie Moore, author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation, and CPD's Chief of Organized Crime, Nicholas Roti. Both Moore and Roti are very skeptical of the worth of making these maps available. They stigmatize neighborhoods and gangs themselves, many of which are not associated with any criminal activity. The maps also are out of date and in the case of many gangs oversimplify a more complex geographical structure. Roti also expresses concern that the maps could cause gang rifts by showing the uneven distribution of territory. Finally, there's the inevitable confusion that gang presence on a block means gang dominance or high crime.

So should these maps really be made public? Maybe not. Should I have posted them on this blog? Maybe not but I couldn't resist.

via The Atlantic Cities

Where Your Money Really Goes

Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory began a series of columns about the insurance industry recently, beginning with Soaring greed at Liberty Mutual. The column described the mutual (owned by policy holders like you and me) company's air force, based out of Hanscom Field in Bedford. Mass. He used the Wall Street Journal's Jet Tracker to show the important places these corporate jets are taking their executives.

Former chief executive Ted Kelly, when not whining about the "excess" salaries and "very rich" benefits that public employees like myself get, has no problem taking the public's money and flying to his vacation house on Cape Cod - a very short drive from the Boston area. One of the most popular flight destinations is Vero Beach, Florida, near another one of his properties. All of those trips took place in the cold weather months. There were also several trips to commercially important places like Bermuda and Hawaii. Apparently his $50 million annual salary was inadequate to pay his own way.

The Wall Street Journal made Freedom of Information Act requests to the FAA to compile this flight information and display it on an interactive map. You can find a company that you are a shareholder of or that you pay bills to and see where your money goes. The table view lists the dates and times of flights and the map view is what you see above.

My previous mortgage holder, Citigroup also appears to have a bit of a taste for spending your money on vacations with 14 trips to Nantucket, 4 to the Bahamas, 21 to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, and one to Marco Island, Florida. My current mortgage holder, Wells Fargo is harder to track because there are so many different entries for them.

Have fun seeing where your money goes while I enjoy my fabulous salary and benefits.

MOTW #61

The Philadelphia Inquirer published a really good map showing 2006 murders in the city. If you click the map below you can go to the interactive map. Click on any dot to get details about the crime - victim, race, time , weapon, etc. You can also use these as filters to see only daytime murders or murders by "hand". Keep in mind that this a an entire year 's worth of data and in most of the city murder is really not that common an occurrence. Really we have lots of nice neighborhoods! I'm serious!