How Chicago's Neighborhoods Evolved on the Map: From Prairies to 77 Community Areas
Ask any Chicagoan where they are from, and the answer will almost certainly be a neighborhood name: Pilsen, Bronzeville, Wicker Park, Beverly, Rogers Park, Bridgeport. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods in a way that few American cities can match, and the cartographic history of how those neighborhoods were defined, named, and bounded is one of the most complex and contested chapters in the city's mapped record. The 77 community areas that define Chicago's official neighborhood geography today were not drawn until the 1920s, but the process of neighborhood formation began more than a century earlier, with the township surveys, the railroad lines, and the waves of immigration that gave each district its distinctive character.
Early Township Boundaries: The Grid Before the Neighborhoods
Before there were neighborhoods, there were townships. The federal rectangular survey system divided the land around Chicago into six-mile-square townships, each identified by a combination of township and range numbers. The area that is now the city of Chicago spans portions of more than a dozen original survey townships, and the boundaries between these townships, which typically followed section lines, became some of the most important streets in the city.
The original Town of Chicago, platted by James Thompson in 1830, occupied a tiny fraction of this township grid. As the city grew, it expanded by annexing portions of surrounding townships, a process that continued sporadically throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Each annexed area brought its own street names, lot numbering system, and sometimes its own municipal services, creating a patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions that would not be fully rationalized until the address renumbering of 1909. The township boundaries themselves, however, persisted as major streets and as informal divisions between sections of the city, and many of them coincide with the boundaries of the 77 community areas that were defined decades later.
The Great Annexation of 1889
The single most dramatic event in the cartographic history of Chicago's neighborhoods was the annexation of June 29, 1889, when the city absorbed four large surrounding townships and parts of two others, quadrupling its area from roughly 43 square miles to approximately 170 square miles in a single day. The annexed communities included the towns of Lake, Lake View, Jefferson, and Hyde Park, each of which had been an independent municipality with its own government, fire department, water system, and identity.
Maps from before and after the 1889 annexation show the transformation vividly. Pre-annexation maps depict Chicago as a relatively compact city surrounded by independent towns, each with its own boundaries clearly marked. Post-annexation maps show an enormously expanded Chicago that stretches from the lake to the western prairies and from the North Shore to the far South Side. The formerly independent towns did not lose their identities overnight, however. Their names persisted as neighborhood designations, and their commercial districts, churches, schools, and social organizations continued to define local life for generations.
Communities Absorbed in the 1889 Annexation
- Town of Lake: A sprawling industrial township south of the city that included the Union Stock Yards, the packinghouses of Packingtown, and the residential neighborhoods of Back of the Yards and Englewood
- Lake View: A prosperous residential township on the North Side that included the lakefront communities of Lake View, Lakeview, and what is now Wrigleyville
- Hyde Park: A large township on the South Side that included the Village of Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Shore, and the area that would become the site of the 1893 World's Fair
- Jefferson: A sprawling west-side township that included Austin, Montclare, and parts of what are now several West Side neighborhoods
- Parts of Cicero and Calumet: Portions of these western and southern townships were also absorbed, extending the city's reach
How Neighborhoods Got Their Names
The names of Chicago's neighborhoods have origins as diverse as the populations that settled them. Some names derive from the original township designations: Lake View, Hyde Park, Jefferson Park. Others come from the developers who platted the subdivisions: Pullman (George Pullman's company town), Hegewisch (Adolph Hegewisch, a manufacturer), and Edgewater (developer J. Lewis Cochran's marketing name for his lakefront subdivision). Some names reflect the geography: Mud Lake, Stony Island, the Prairie District. And many reflect the ethnic communities that settled there: Pilsen (named by Czech immigrants after the city of Plzen), Greektown, Little Italy, Chinatown, Bronzeville (the African American cultural capital of the early twentieth century).
The cartographic record of these names is surprisingly inconsistent. Early maps often label areas by their township or subdivision names, which may differ from the names used by residents. A neighborhood known locally by one name might appear on maps under a different name, or under no name at all. The boundaries between neighborhoods were equally fluid, shifting over time as ethnic communities expanded, contracted, or moved in response to immigration, industrial development, transportation changes, and discriminatory policies such as restrictive covenants and redlining.
The 77 Community Areas: Defining the Map
The 77 community areas that define Chicago's official neighborhood geography were established in the late 1920s by sociologists at the University of Chicago, primarily Ernest Burgess and his students. Burgess's team used a combination of physical boundaries (rivers, railroads, major streets, parks), census tract data, local identification patterns, and the commercial structures of neighborhood life (shopping districts, parish boundaries, institutional service areas) to define a set of community areas that would provide a stable geographic framework for social science research.
The resulting map, first published in the mid-1920s and officially adopted by the city in 1930, divided Chicago into 75 community areas. Two more, Edgewater and O'Hare, were added later, bringing the total to 77. Each community area was assigned a number and a name, and these designations have remained essentially unchanged for nearly a century, providing a consistent geographic framework that has been used by city agencies, social service organizations, researchers, and residents for everything from census analysis to pizza delivery zones.
The 77 Community Areas by Region
- North Side (Areas 1-7, 21-22, 77): Rogers Park, West Ridge, Uptown, Lincoln Square, North Center, Lake View, Lincoln Park, Edgewater, and O'Hare
- Northwest Side (Areas 10-20): Norwood Park, Jefferson Park, Forest Glen, North Park, Albany Park, Portage Park, Irving Park, Dunning, Montclare, Belmont Cragin, Hermosa
- West Side (Areas 23-31): Humboldt Park, West Town, Austin, West Garfield Park, East Garfield Park, Near West Side, North Lawndale, South Lawndale, Lower West Side
- Central (Areas 8, 32-33): Near North Side, Loop, Near South Side
- South Side (Areas 34-43, 60-75): Armour Square, Douglas, Oakland, Fuller Park, Grand Boulevard, Kenwood, Washington Park, Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Shore, and the far South Side communities
- Southwest Side (Areas 56-65): Garfield Ridge, Archer Heights, Brighton Park, McKinley Park, New City, West Elsdon, Gage Park, Clearing, West Lawn, Chicago Lawn
Ethnic Enclaves on the Map
One of the most fascinating aspects of Chicago's neighborhood cartography is the way maps document the ethnic composition of different areas over time. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Chicago attracted wave after wave of immigrants: Irish and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s, Scandinavians and Bohemians in the 1860s and 1870s, Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, and Eastern European Jews in the 1880s through 1910s, African Americans from the rural South during the Great Migration of the 1910s through 1960s, and Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and later Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants throughout the twentieth century.
Each of these groups tended to settle in specific neighborhoods, creating ethnic enclaves that were visible on maps of commercial districts, religious institutions, and social organizations. Maps showing the locations of churches and synagogues, for example, reveal the settlement patterns of specific ethnic groups with remarkable precision: a cluster of Polish Catholic parishes along Milwaukee Avenue on the Northwest Side, a string of African American churches along South State Street in Bronzeville, a concentration of Mexican businesses along 18th Street in Pilsen. The Sanborn fire insurance maps are particularly valuable for this kind of research because they identify the use of every building, allowing researchers to locate specific ethnic businesses, institutions, and meeting halls.
Redlining Maps: Cartography as Discrimination
Among the most historically significant and controversial maps in Chicago's neighborhood history are the residential security maps produced by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s. These maps, which have come to be known as "redlining maps," divided the city into zones rated from A ("Best") to D ("Hazardous"), with the ratings based on a combination of housing conditions, income levels, and, crucially, the racial and ethnic composition of the residents.
On the HOLC maps, areas rated A were typically affluent, white, suburban-style neighborhoods, shown in green. Areas rated B were "Still Desirable," shown in blue. Areas rated C were "Declining," shown in yellow. And areas rated D were "Hazardous," shown in red, a designation that was applied overwhelmingly to neighborhoods with African American, immigrant, or mixed-race populations. These maps were used by banks and insurance companies to justify denying mortgages and insurance to residents of "red-lined" neighborhoods, a practice that systematically deprived communities of color of access to homeownership, wealth accumulation, and neighborhood investment for decades.
The HOLC maps of Chicago, which were produced in 1940, are among the most detailed redlining documents for any American city. They include not only the color-coded zone maps but also written descriptions of each area that explicitly reference the racial and ethnic characteristics of residents as negative factors. These descriptions make the discriminatory intent of the maps unmistakably clear, and they have been used by researchers, civil rights organizations, and government agencies to document the legacy of systemic racism in housing policy.
Lasting Impact of Redlining on Chicago's Map
- Disinvestment patterns: Neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s and 1940s experienced decades of underinvestment in housing, infrastructure, and commercial development, effects that are still visible on contemporary maps of property values and economic indicators
- Racial segregation: The redlining maps both reflected and reinforced patterns of racial segregation that persisted long after the maps themselves fell out of official use
- Environmental justice: Redlined neighborhoods were disproportionately zoned for industrial use and located near pollution sources, a pattern that environmental justice researchers have documented using overlays of HOLC maps and environmental data
- Health disparities: Public health researchers have found correlations between historical redlining and contemporary health outcomes, including life expectancy, chronic disease rates, and access to healthcare
Demographic Shift Maps: The Changing Face of Neighborhoods
Chicago's neighborhoods have never been static, and the cartographic record documents waves of demographic change that have reshaped the city's social geography repeatedly over the past century. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to Chicago's South and West sides between 1910 and 1970, creating vibrant communities such as Bronzeville, which became the cultural capital of Black America. Subsequent decades brought deindustrialization, white flight, urban renewal, and gentrification, each of which produced new patterns visible on demographic maps.
Census maps from successive decades tell the story of these changes with statistical precision. Maps from the 1920s show a city sharply divided between a mostly white North and West Side and a growing Black Belt on the South Side. Maps from the 1960s show the expansion of African American communities into formerly white neighborhoods on the West Side. Maps from the 1990s and 2000s show the growth of Latino communities in neighborhoods such as Pilsen, Little Village, and Humboldt Park, and the beginnings of gentrification in neighborhoods such as Wicker Park and Logan Square. Each wave of change leaves its mark on the map, and the cartographic record allows us to see these changes with a clarity that narrative history alone cannot provide.
At Earliest Chicago Maps, we specialize in helping collectors, researchers, and community organizations connect with the cartographic record of Chicago's neighborhoods. Our reproduction prints of neighborhood maps from different eras make compelling display pieces for homes, offices, community centers, and educational institutions. Our research services team can assist with neighborhood history projects, genealogical research, and property investigations using our extensive collection of historical maps and atlases. And our Chicago Timeline Explorer lets you navigate the city's neighborhood evolution decade by decade, from the prairies of the 1830s to the 77 community areas of today.
