Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on 1850, 1880, and 1910 census data, it shows how migration, residential, and occupational patterns shaped the city.
The Digital Atlas breaks new ground by locating each person counted in the Census at their home address, sometimes before the street grid was even established. To do this work we used preserved historical maps and city directories, and even traced census takers’ steps, to locate residences. The Atlas is a living project that will expand to include all five boroughs up to the 1940 census.
We invite you to use the website’s interactive features to map and visualize the residential geographies of New Yorkers and Brooklynites by their race, gender, place of birth, and occupation across the years. You can zoom in and out to view the whole city, neighborhoods, or individual buildings. You will discover spatial patterns and trends that would be impossible to grasp by looking at census records alone.
There are many histories of New York that may be found in the maps. The Digital Atlas includes a few case studies to show how selected data may be visualized to tell a story. We invite you to create your own.
Those interested in more in-depth research and alternate methods of visualizing data may access the digital layers and underlying data of the assembled maps.
The Digital Atlas is based on historical maps that capture the layout of the city at three moments in time. The maps were drawn according to prevailing methods of marking and organizing space, such as the private ownership of land and buildings, streets and rail lines to facilitate human mobility and commerce, construction of tenements and apartment buildings, and the city’s “grid” design, planned in 1811 as a vision of urban order. From 1850 to 1880 to 1910, enormous changes took place across the city as farming gave way to industry, new housing and zoning patterns reorganized everyday life, and mass immigration from Europe diversified the population. Brooklyn was a separate city until it incorporated into New York City in 1898.
The maps also contain traces of older histories. Broadway was built over the Wickquasgeck Trail used by indigenous Lenape people until the 17th century to connect Manahatta to what we now call upstate New York. In Brooklyn, old Native American trails became major streets. One can trace the movement of Black people after slavery was abolished in New York in 1827. As late as 1910, the street grid in Brooklyn bumped up against remaining farmlands.
Data
The maps use 6.5 million unique census records for 1850, 1880, and 1910, matched to home locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, available from contemporary fire insurance atlases. Early census records often do not record specific street addresses. For 1850, we relied on city directories (which include names, occupations, and addresses) and tracked the paths walked by census takers.